A Crowdsourced System for Creating Practice Questions in a Clinical Presentation Medical Curriculum

Overview Medical students must learn a large amount of information in their first 2 years of medical school. Question banks such as UWorld and COMBANK are a popular method of preparation for national board exams, but it is difficult to have a similar uniform resource to prepare for exams administered by individual medical schools because the curriculum varies from school to school. Project Creation and Implementation In order to help prepare for course exams, students from the Class of 2017 at A.T. Still University School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona (ATSU-SOMA) collaborated to create crowdsourced practice quizzes based on the specific material taught at their school. Google Drive was used to manage sign-up sheets and collect questions, and Blackboard was used to create automatically graded practice quizzes. Methods and Results Participants were given a survey at the end of their second year of medical school to assess their opinions of the project’s effectiveness. Students indicated that participation in the project helped them feel more confident on exams, improved their ability to write higher-order, clinically based questions, and improved their ability to predict what types of questions would be used on school-administered exams. Participants ranked the crowdsourced practice quizzes as more useful than textbook practice questions and as useful as faculty-written practice quizzes, board question banks, and verbal quizzing in study groups in preparing for school-administered exams. Comparison of study participant course grades and medical-school grade point average suggested the practice quizzes may benefit lower-performing students more than higher-performing students.