A comparison of national and in-house examinations of psychiatric knowledge

The search continues for the optimum method of assessing psychiatric residents' knowledge. In 1982, 72% of the U.S. residency programs gave the Psychiatry Resident In-Training Examination ( PRITE ). The authors compared the PRITE with an examination developed by their program. The two tests yielded highly correlated percentages of correct responses and resident rank orders for advanced residents, detected similar areas of weakness, had comparable dollar costs, and elicited similar, moderately high resident satisfaction. Important differences were the amount of information and feedback provided to residents and to the residency program and the time between the test and the feedback.