Background National licensing examinations (NLEs) are large-scale examinations usually taken by medical doctors close to the point of graduation from medical school. Where NLEs are used, success is usually required to obtain a license for full practice. Approaches to national licensing, and the evidence that supports their use, varies significantly across the globe. This paper aims to develop a...

It is interesting to see how some developments in assessment in the USA and UK seem to have gone in opposite directions. The USA has a longstanding tradition of highquality national licensing examinations, whereas, in the UK, each medical school has traditionally been responsible for its own examination programmes. Although UK medical schools use external examiners, the country has no national ...

BACKGROUND To investigate the existing evidence base for the validity of large-scale licensing examinations including their impact. METHODS Systematic review against a validity framework exploring: Embase (Ovid Medline); Medline (EBSCO); PubMed; Wiley Online; ScienceDirect; and PsychINFO from 2005 to April 2015. All papers were included when they discussed national or large regional (State le...

The unification of Europe in higher education in general and in medical education in particular is progressing. Since the Bologna declaration most of the European countries are in the process of introducing a two-cycle training programme in higher education that also affects medical training programmes (Patricio et al. 2008). Within the European legislature there is free mobility of professiona...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the predictive validity of osteopathic medical licensing examinations for osteopathic medical knowledge measured by graduate written medical examinations. Performances on the three osteopathic initial licensing examinations, the three osteopathic internal medicine in-service examinations, and the osteopathic internal medicine board certification examina...

The start D’Souza,1 stated that the origins of the Periodic Health Examination (PHE) or screening occurred in a brothel in the papal state of Avignon in 1347, “when an abbess and a local surgeon, every Saturday, singly examined women ‘in the home’ and if any of them had contracted any illness by their whoring, they were separated from the rest and not allowed to prostitute themselves for fear t...

Heads: A medical student completes their Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery (MBBS) degree after five years mentally exhausting back-breaking toil. They then go on to complete one demanding year internship in a hospital. Now they want start clinical practice. The regulatory body physicians has some other ideas though. It wants them give yet another exam, covering the same subjects have cleared dur...

Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) has been implemented in high-stakes examinations such as the National Council Licensure Examination-Registered Nurses in the United States since 1994. Subsequently, the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians in the United States adopted CAT for certifying emergency medical technicians in 2007. This was done with the goal of introducing the impleme...