Assessing medical students' clinical sciences knowledge in France: a collaboration between the NBME and a consortium of French medical schools.
OBJECTIVE
The French government, as part of medical education reforms, has affirmed that an examination program for national residency selection will be implemented by 2004. The purpose of this study was to develop a French multiple-choice (MC) examination using the National Board of Medical Examiners' (NBME) expertise and materials.


METHODS
The Evaluation Standardisée du Second Cycle (ESSC), a four-hour clinical sciences examination, was administered in January 2002 to 285 medical students at four university test sites in France. The ESSC had 200 translated and adapted MC items selected from the Comprehensive Clinical Sciences Examination (CCSE), an NBME subject test.


RESULTS
Less than 10% of the ESSC items were rejected as inappropriate to French practice. Also, the distributions of ESSC item characteristics were similar to those reported with the CCSE. The ESSC also appeared to be very well targeted to examinees' proficiencies and yielded a reliability coefficient of.91. However, because of a higher word count, the ESSC did show evidence of speededness. Regarding overall performance, the mean proficiency estimate for French examinees was about 0.4 SD below that of a CCSE population.


CONCLUSIONS
This study provides strong evidence for the usefulness of the model adopted in this first collaborative effort between the NBME and a consortium of French medical schools. Overall, the performance of French students was comparable to that of CCSE students, which was encouraging given the differences in motivation and the speeded nature of the French test. A second phase with the participation of larger numbers of French medical schools and students is being planned.
De Champlain
André F
AF
National Board of Medical Examiners, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. adechamplain@nbme.org
Melnick
Donald
D
Scoles
Peter
P
Subhiyah
Raja
R
Holtzman
Kathy
K
Swanson
David
D
Angelucci
Kathy
K
McGrenra
Cathy
C
Fournier
Jean-Paul
JP
Benchimol
Daniel
D
Rampal
Patrick
P
Staccini
Pascal
P
Braun
Marc
M
Kohler
Chantal
C
Guidet
Bertrand
B
Claudepierre
Pascal
P
Prével
Marc
M
Goldberg
James
J
D015510:Clinical Medicine / Q000193:education*; D004521:Educational Measurement; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012577:Schools, Medical; D013337:Students, Medical