[Teaching merit should be valued? Reflections and proposals]

Can intellectual performance be evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively, and can it be useful to evaluate competence and pedagogic capacity? Experts and laws attempted to answer these questions in the last years. A recent law establishes that the Board of examiners should formulate the evaluation criteria of maximum before the examination of titles to proceed with a fair evaluation of didactic and scientific titles of the candidates. A clear and unequivocal position on the importance of teaching in Medical Schools comes from the Consensus Conference of the World Federation for Medical Education in 1988 and more recently from the World Summit on Medical Education (1993). Proposals: a task-force has recently been constituted with the following objectives: identify of evaluation criteria on teaching competence and formulate strategies of co-optation. Action: teaching and pedagogic capacities should be evaluated in a quantitative and qualitative manner. The Faculty and/or other institutional organisms could certify teaching activity within the Faculty (quantitative indicators) through the "credit system" and the quality of teaching could be evaluated by the students and/or by institutional organisms.

The evaluation of teaching competence in equally important as the evaluation of biomedical research.