The rating of pre-clerkship examination questions by postgraduate medical students: an assessment of quality and relevancy to medical practice

Objective To determine whether postgraduate students are able to assess the quality of undergraduate medical examinations and to establish whether faculty can use their results to troubleshoot the curriculum in terms of its content and evaluation. Subjects First and second year family medicine postgraduate students. Materials A randomly generated sample of undergraduate medical examination questions. Methods Postgraduate students were given two undergraduate examinations which included questions with an item difficulty (ID) > 0·60. The students answered and then rated each question on a scale of 1–7. Results The percentage of postgraduate students answering each question correctly correlated significantly with the average perceived relevance (Examination 1: r=0·372; P