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.
National Board of Medical Examiners, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. adechamplain@nbme.org
André F
AF
De Champlain
Donald
D
Melnick
Peter
P
Scoles
Raja
R
Subhiyah
Kathy
K
Holtzman
David
D
Swanson
Kathy
K
Angelucci
Cathy
C
McGrenra
Jean-Paul
JP
Fournier
Daniel
D
Benchimol
Patrick
P
Rampal
Pascal
P
Staccini
Marc
M
Braun
Chantal
C
Kohler
Bertrand
B
Guidet
Pascal
P
Claudepierre
Marc
M
Prével
James
J
Goldberg
D015510:Clinical Medicine / Q000193:education*; D004521:Educational Measurement; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012577:Schools, Medical; D013337:Students, Medical