What are your thoughts on: global rating vs checklist rating?

[marta12345]

An OSCE assessor told me that checklist rating does not allow her to rate the applicants soft skills and that's why global ratings are very useful. I do think that checklists are reductionist in their approach, but would not global assessment let the bias or idiosyncrasies of assessors affect the individual's score.

What are your thoughts on: global rating vs checklist rating?

 

[freewheeler]

P = MD

[Snowmen]

Our OSCEs rating grids include some more subjective categories (ensuring patient comfort, empathy, etc.) on top of the objective ones (seeking specific symptoms, risk factors, etc.) and evaluators then assign a final mark based on the marks reached in individual categories while still having a bit of flexiblity. To me, that sounds like a good middle-ground.

[ralk]

17 hours ago, med9993 said:

An OSCE assessor told me that checklist rating does not allow her to rate the applicants soft skills and that's why global ratings are very useful. I do think that checklists are reductionist in their approach, but would not global assessment let the bias or idiosyncrasies of assessors affect the individual's score.

What are your thoughts on: global rating vs checklist rating?

 

Global ratings and checklist ratings on OSCEs are two evaluation metrics designed to look at different aspects to patient interactions, both of which are important. Ideally, if the OSCE is well-designed and applicable to clinical practice, students should be clearly passing both, with any biases evened out by the fact that there are multiple OSCE stations with multiple assessors.

Realistically though, OSCEs are a poor facsimile of actual clinical practice and their main value is to show that you'll work hard enough to pass them while having an overall medical knowledge and interpersonal skills that you won't be an immediate danger to patients. While it would be nice to have OSCE be useful tools to evaluate and strengthen student abilities, they're very far from that. They're a hurdle to jump over. As freewheeler says, P = MD.