Question vetting: the process to ensure quality in assessment of medical students

Over the past decade, medical schools have made new efforts to provide accurate, reliable, and timely assessments of the competence of trainees. All methods of assessment have strengths and intrinsic flaws. Written examination questions forms an important item in knowledge assessment and are typically classified according to whether they are open-ended or multiple choices. At present questions are prepared casually just before the examination and are not put through any quality check to correct any possible mistakes or ambiguity in the questions. This may lead to confusion or wrong understanding of the questions by the students which will be reflected in their answers as well. Question Vetting is the process when an expert person examines or evaluates and edits questions to make it free of any mistakes. The importance of vetting and re-vetting of examination questions cannot be overstated in the present scenario of medical education. There is a prescribed structure and protocol of question setting and vetting for examinations in medical education programmes. The areas that need to be examined during question vetting are for technical accuracy, content level and language aspects. The use of the prescribed structure and protocol of question vetting ensures a consistently high standard of question presentation during examinations which will help the students to understand the questions better and to answer them correctly. This article is intended to highlight the importance of introducing question vetting in our medical education scenario in order to improve the quality of assessment of medical students.