Tilo Freiwald, Madjid Salimi, Ehsan Khaljani, Sigrid Harendza
BACKGROUND: Multiple-choice questions (MCQ) are still widely used in high stakes medical exams. We wanted to examine whether and to what extent a national licensing exam uses the concept of pattern recognition to test applied clinical knowledge. METHODS: We categorized all 4,134 German National medical licensing exam questions between October 2006 and October 2012 by discipline, year, and type. We analyzed questions from the four largest disciplines: internal medicine (n = 931), neurology (n = 305), pediatrics (n = 281), and surgery (n = 233), with respect to the following question types: knowledge questions (KQ), pattern recognition questions (PRQ), inverse PRQ (IPRQ), and pseudo PRQ (PPRQ)...
November 14, 2014: BMC Medical Education