More Success with Practique in the Medical School

The Medical School continue to successfully develop their new exam assessment system, Practique

In August 2017, following a successful procurement project, the Medical School implemented Practique to support all written exams for Years 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6. By January 2018 over 50 exams,100% of all written formative and summative assessments, had been successfully sat via the new system, with students responding positively to the new candidate reports that they received after completing their formative exams. The effort required to create a question and image bank was immense, but the academic and administrative staff accepted the challenge, supported by the Project Core team, and continue to imbed the use of Practique into the assessment life cycle.

Additionally, the Project Core team completed a series of training sessions across the Medical School, introduced single sign on via EASE, implemented a series of formative assessments that students could take on their own devices, generated, tested and signed off a number of new features whilst embedding themselves within the Practique User Group which includes a number of UK based Universities such as Imperial College London.

Looking ahead the Project Team continue to develop business processes, enhancements and will expand the usage of the system by introducing OSCE ( Objective Structured Clinical Examinations) in the next academic year 2018-19. As such, the Project Core team continue to develop the platform, while reviewing and amending existing work flows to establish further benefits for all users of the assessment tool. Thus students are benefitting already from sitting their exams using an extremely stable and simple assessment tool, with associated improvements in image quality, the ability to take some formative exams in their own time on their own devices and receiving ever improving feedback. Meanwhile the academics, administrative and statisticians will benefit over time with an improved ability to assess not just the students, but the quality of the questions, answers and exams at a level never before achievable. Exciting times!

The associated image displays the exam entry screen atop an administrative window, indicating five concurrent exams are currently active on the system (as of May 10, 2018).