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Does An Exam A/B Format Improve Academic Performance of Physiology Medical Students?
Author(s) -
Colden Margaret
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.2019.33.1_supplement.598.3
Subject(s) - curriculum , medical education , test (biology) , mathematics education , entrance exam , medical school , final examination , psychology , medicine , pedagogy , biology , paleontology
Recent changes in exam policies at the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine in Sint Maarten were implemented to improve the academic performance of the basic medical sciences students. In this study, I tested the hypothesis that allowing students to be tested on the same material taking an Exam A and then an Exam B with different questions one or two days later would significantly increase the average final course grades in Physiology I, a 2 nd semester course of the 5‐semester basic medical science curriculum. The study subjects consisted of 291 students (2018 matriculants) who experienced the Exam A/B format and were compared to a similar cohort of 286 students (2017 matriculants) who took only one Exam over identical material for each block of material. The relationship between exam format and final course grades was determined by t ‐test analysis with p <0.05 significance. The mean final course grade for the 291 students who had the Exam A/B format was 82.2 ± 0.5% and averaged a 3.6 percentage points (p<0.001) higher final course grade than the students who took only one exam for each block of material (78.6 ± 0.5%, n = 286). These findings suggest a very small but significant improvement in academic performance when students had the opportunity to take two exams over the same material and take the highest score. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .