Effects of Self Assessment of the Examination Questions by Educational Groups on the Quality of Final Exams

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Active participation of educational groups in final exam analysis has an important effect on the improvement of the question quality. This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of this self assessment on the quality of examination questions in the faculty of dentistry of Babol medical university, Babol, Iran. METHODS: This cross sectional study was performed on 22 faculty members of dentistry faculty who attended workshop on question evaluation. They are required to evaluate the exam questions before and after each examination. Exam questions of second half of academic years of 2006-2007 and 2008-2009 which used as pre-and post test respectively were evaluated and compared.FINDINGS: In this study 367 questions as pretest and 284 questions as post tests were evaluated. The average score for the faculty members (number of mistakes to number of questions) was 0.29±0.23 in pretest (ranging 0-0.87) and 0.18±0.14 in post tests (ranging 0-0.5). In evaluating taxonomy grade, 94% of questions of the year 2007 had taxonomy 1, 5.7% had taxonomy 2 and 0.27% had taxonomy 3. In the year 2009, 95.4% of the questions had taxonomy 1 and the others had taxonomy 2.CONCLUSION: The results of this study showed that assessment of the questions prior to the exam by educational groups will lead to an increase in examination quality.

Keywords

• self-assessment
• examination questions
• educational groups
• final exams