Structured Skill Test in Physical Examination

Abstract

To evaluate 52 fourth-year medical students' skills in giving physical examinations, a list of 89 skills was composed and distributed to students and instructors of a course in introduction to clinical medicine. During the test students were given 10 min. to demonstrate their skills on 10 randomly selected tasks. Three examiners independently evaluated each of the 10 performances. It was demonstrated that such a procedure results in an efficient test which possesses content validity. In the absence of well defined criteria for grading, the inter-judge reliability of the scores was rather low.