Faculty assessments of case reports of medical students

The interassessor reliability of faculty assessments was evaluated in a study aimed at enhancing the educational value of marking medical student case reports. After criteria for case report assessment were developed, three student write-ups were sent for evaluation to 17 volunteer faculty members with extensive teaching and assessment experience. Content analysis of their narrative comments and analysis of their global ratings of the student reports revealed marked disparities in the criteria the different assessors felt were important and an unacceptable spread in the ratings assigned to the reports. The study showed that the current case report assessment method was unreliable and that it should be replaced by a standardized assessment instrument.