Scoring consistency of standard patients and examiners in the developed dental objective structured clinical...

To investigate the role of standard patients (SPs) and examiners as assessors for scoring in the dental objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) system and to evaluate the scoring differences between them.

We developed the doctor-patient communication and clinical examination station in the OSCE system. The examination time of this station was 10 min, and the examination institution wrote the script and recruited SPs. A total of 146 examinees who received standardized resident training at the Nanjing Stomatological Hospital, Medical School of Nanjing University between 2018 and 2021 were assessed. They were scored by SPs and examiners according to the same scoring rubrics. Subsequently, the SPSS software was used to analyze the examination results of different assessors and evaluate the consistency.

The average score of all examinees provided by SPs and examiners was 90.45 ± 3.52 and 91.53 ± 4.13, respectively. The consistency analysis showed that the intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.718, which was indicative of medium consistency.

Our findings showed that SPs could be used directly as assessors, as they could provide a simulated and realistic clinical setting and create favorable conditions for comprehensive competence training and improvement for medical students.