Anyone know how to run an online exam?
By Senior Psychiatry Registrar
Another Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry exam fail, another delay in accrediting Australia’s next cohort of mental health specialists.
Eminent psychiatrists, such as National Association of Practising Psychiatrists president Dr Philip Morris and Dr Ted Cassidy, are calling for the trainees to be urgently passed retrospectively based on the 150 formative work-based assessments they have already completed up to this point.
Trainee psychiatrists are exhausted after repeatedly cancelling or deferring major life plans in order to sit these exams, which for many are the final hurdle before full accreditation. They are desperate to relax and return to the regular pressures of modern day pandemic life, while working long hours in our hospitals and often on the frontline.
To make clear the dire nature of the situation: since October 2019 only 207 Australian & New Zealand trainees have been able to sit the OSCE; of this group, only 25 candidates were from NSW, a state disproportionately impacted by the bungled exams. For comparison, in the period spanning from October 2017 to November 2019, a total of 682 Australian & New Zealand trainees were able to sit the OSCE.
If these statistics don’t seem relevant to the public, they should; for every trainee psychiatrist delayed in their progression, crucial psychiatric care becomes less accessible to all.
But despite all this and the mainstream media attention the failure has attracted, the RANZCP’s committee for examinations is resisting changing the rules for this cohort. That would “lower the standard” of graduated psychiatrists, according to one reported comment from an emergency meeting yesterday. This prompts one towonder what the standards are exactly – given that those setting them are unable to deploy technology that has been used in every educational institution and business since the start of the pandemic.
This cancelled OSCE is the fourth in two years. The July exam this year went ahead but excluded NSW, the most populous state, for being in lockdown.
And it’s not just the technical failure that is the problem. The training program is old and outdated. A review by the Australian Council for Examination Research (ACER) completed just last year called for reform, recommending the committee review and consolidate the entire examination process. Instead the committee increased the number of major assessments from five to six (critical essay examination, multiple choice and critical appraisal exam, modified essay exam, psychotherapy written case, scholarly project and OSCE).
A particular exam under the ACER spotlight is the essay-style examination. This is another “essential” component for trainees to pass, and was recommended to be scrapped in ACER’s report. This exam is considered by many to be irrelevant as it mostly tests if one’s writing is neat and fast (it gives candidates only 50 minutes to handwrite a complete essay). Those who pass are granted a pen licence and a psychiatric fellowship.
The great irony is that we all know the less legible a doctor’s handwriting the more senior they must be. We wrote to the college to ask if candidates were allowed to use an ink and quill, but – well … we couldn’t read their response.
Jokes aside, the sad truth is that the essay-style exam frequently fails to pass trainees who are not white or privately educated enough. Doctors who have moved to Australia, many fleeing prejudice and violence and all of them under more pressure than local candidates, have failed the program because of this exam despite passing everything else.
The recent online OSCE bungles have just added to what is obviously a long and expensive training program. It gets longer and more expensive the more exams that are failed (and more so for those who are from non-English-speaking backgrounds) – and pass rates are low. Only 15% of all psychiatry trainees finish their specialist training in the standard five years, with the average time to completion resting around seven years.
Now, two years may not sound like a lot considering psychiatrists have 14+ years of tertiary education. But if graduating from high school took two years longer than advertised (and if it then took another two years because schools couldn’t figure out how to run computer-based exams in a pandemic) then Australia would be in an uproar because of the shortage of McDonald’s burger flippers.
There is now such a backlog of psychiatry trainees, they are taking stress leave and trying to see psychiatrists for their own mental health. Unfortunately they face long waits as there are not enough psychiatrists in Australia.
Why couldn’t the college run a national internet-based examination? It is only speculation, but tech-savvy trainees strongly suspect the online exam crashed because the college failed to purchase enough Zoom licences.
More here:
https://medicalrepublic.com.au/anyone-know-how-to-run-an-online-exam/58565
There also seems to be this issue emerging…
Fears of psychiatrist shortage after two years of cancelled exams
By Lucy Carroll and Mary Ward
The latest attempt at holding the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP)’s final trainee exams via video link were abandoned midway through on Saturday due to technical difficulties.
Roughly 270 trainees were affected. The objective structured clinical exam involved the remote supervision of role-play scenarios.
A letter sent by the NSW Association of Psychiatry Trainees expressed “concern and disappointment” the exam had not been able to go ahead, after being postponed from October 30.
Footage seen by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of a debrief meeting held after the cancelled exam showed heated discussion between trainees and college examiners which descended into participants shouting over the top of each other.
It was the third time the exam, which doctors must pass to become a fully qualified fellow of the college, have been cancelled since April 2020, when they were first disrupted by COVID-19 restrictions.
While two exams have successfully been held during that time with a reduced number taking part, a national survey of trainees conducted by the association found 88 per cent reported having two or more attempts at the exam delayed or cancelled and 27 per cent said all five exams had been disrupted.
It finds that, between October 2019 and November 2021, only 207 trainees sat the exams across Australia and New Zealand, compared with 682 between October 2017 and November 2019.
In a statement, RANZCP said 90 of the doctors taking Saturday’s exams were from NSW, where trainees were previously affected by the cancellation of an exam in July with one week’s notice. Twenty-seven of the centralised exams were completed in NSW during 2020 and 2021,
Lots more here:
And then there are the poor victims….
Registrars in 'significant distress' after another remote exam failure
An IT glitch forced the college of psychiatrists to cancel its OSCE part way through on Saturday
22nd November 2021
Nearly 300 psychiatry registrars will be forced to resit their clinical fellowship exam after yet another major IT glitch affecting a medical college.
In a scenario that echoes the RACGP’s exam debacle last year, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) was forced to cancel its Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) on Saturday.
The college has blamed a “videoconferencing failure” during the morning session of the exam, which was conducted by an external provider remotely in candidates' homes.
As a result, the 270 candidates — some of whom had reportedly waited 18 months to sit their exams — along with examiners and role players, were unable to join their virtual "rooms" for assessment.
Again more here:
https://www.ausdoc.com.au/news/registrars-significant-distress-after-another-remote-exam-failure
You really wonder just why the Colleges keep stuffing these exams up. Surely a few experts could make sure this sort of issue just didn’t occur again short of nuclear war!
Wanders off into the evening shaking head…
David.
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