Exploring the unanticipated value of an oral exam integrating content across courses

An oral examination, in addition to assessing knowledge gains, can assess various skills including communication, critical thinking, and decision-making. These anticipated outcomes are valuable in helping students matriculate. This study aims to describe and explore unanticipated effects of an oral exam, and how those effects can have a positive long-term influence on student learning.

An Integrated Oral Exam (IOE) was used to assess a student's ability to effectively integrate and apply knowledge from multiple pharmacotherapy content areas to address complex patient cases. Students were required to develop care plans, and verbally explain, rationalize, and defend the plans with an evaluator during a one-on-one question and answer assessment. The IOE is administered in the spring semester of the second year. It consists of two cases followed by a debriefing session using a modified plus-delta approach.

An evaluation sought to develop a deeper understanding of the exam by exploring: why is this working and what is happening? Five years of student debriefing documentation underwent multiple cycles of coding. In addition to inductive coding exploring the exam's functioning, Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning was used for deductive coding.

While it was expected that there would be evidence of the exam's influence on Foundational Knowledge and Integration, unanticipated exam effects included Caring, Learning How to Learn, and the Human Dimension from Fink's Taxonomy. The IOE has both a summative and formative effect (ie, Assessment of Learning and an Assessment for Learning) and also functions as a high-impact assessment practice.