Consistent

As you may expect, during the final examination, we naturally discussed how to modify or improve the format of the examination - at least to cater for the increasing number of medical students.

I shall not elaborate on what was discussed, or what our conclusion was. Nonetheless, the conversations with several persons turned out to be a good lesson on logic, which I may well share with you here.

Let's begin with some simple stuff. There are two common suggestions for our system of clinical examination:

1. The assessment should resemble real life clinical practice.
2. The assessment should avoid variation and be consistent for all students.

My response to the two suggestions is they are an unfortunate irony: Clinical practice is full of uncertainty and nothing could be consistent. An examination that mimics real life practice is always variable, and a consistent method of assessment is by definition artificial.

Simple, eh?

Let me show you the difficult bit tomorrow.