Clinical Skills Assessment at NEOUCOM: A Description

Abstract

Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine's (NEOUCOM) responseto an LCME mandate (1990) was to develop and administer a ComprehensiveClinical Competency Assessment (CCCA) to rising senior medical students.This paper presents facets of this assessment from its inception toimplementation. These facets include background information, examdevelopment and blueprints, a case development protocol and checklist,scoring which includes a migration from a norm referenced P/Fdesignation to an Acceptable Level of Performance (ALP) and on to aconjunctive rather than compensatory format, feedback to students in theform of oral feedback from the physician raters, written feedback fromboth the physician rater and the standardized patients and a histogramdenoting how well a student performed compared to his peers, and resultsof the assessment.