In the complex ecosystem of medical education, we expect an assessment scheme to fulfil multiple purposes. The purposes, either explicit or implicit, are varied and not necessarily congruent with one another. For example, we expect assessment in medical education to:assure the public about the quality of graduating doctors; guide curriculum planners towards better programme development; differentiate and rank students based on their abilities; help students monitor their own learning; maintain a high degree of fairness and objectivity in testing, and generate data to enable continuous quality improvement.That many stakeholders are interested in the information gained from assessment makes the many purposes of a given assessment unsurprising.
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