Retrospective Analysis of Time-of-Day vs. Student Performance on Medical School Module Exams

M2 Year Elective, Fall 2014, Emory University School of Medicine

View the Project on GitHub sgurbani/m2elective

Authors

Saumya S. Gurbani, MSE, MD/PhD Student, Emory University School of Medicine David A. Schulman, MD, MPH, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine

Aim

For module examinations, the Class of 2017 has been split into three anatomy teams, which determines the order in which sections of each exam are taken. The aim of this study is to analyze scores to determine if there is a significant difference in exam section scores based on the time of day or testing order.

Module exams which contain the following three components were included in the analysis:

Traditional multiple-choice questions (MCQ) taken electronically via Blackboard
National Board of Medical Examiners questions (NBME) which are clinically based and model the USMLE Step 1 exam
Essay and/or short answer questions, taken on paper

The six modules for the Class of 2017 which meet this criteria are:

Pulmonology (March 2014)
Cardiology (April 2014)
GI (May 2014)
Renal (June 2014)
Hematology / Oncology (September 2014)
Neuroscience I (October 2014)