Manual for ESTRO Teachers

UNION EUROPÉENNE DES MÉDEC INS SPÉC IAL I STES

EUROPEAN UNION OF MEDI CAL SPEC IAL I STS

Association internationale sans but lucratif – International non-profit organisation

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OURONNE

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task of developing high-quality European MCQs. The face-to-face format is also educational to the

individual MCQ writers and usually enhances the quality of subsequent MCQs. In general, the quality

of questions produced by any individual writer tends to increase with time and collaborative

experiences. In the context of a European exam, writers from different countries, different cultures

and different languages must be sourced. This will ultimately ensure the highest validity of any

examination at a European level.

If well chaired these sessions are much more productive than the more impersonal communication

methods such as e-mails or tele-conferences. Each session needs to have a time limit for discussion

for each individual question with the conclusions of "accepted", "rejected", or "back to the author for

reworking". Once a question has been accepted it needs to be categorised in terms of its length, its

difficulty and the section of the curriculum to which it refers. All MCQs writers must have access to

current versions of the relevant curriculum and should be encouraged to index their questions as

they construct them. Ideally, an electronic template should be employed for writing and then

discussing new MCQs. This helps to facilitate uniformity of MCQs writing style, transmission of the

questions to other members of the writing group and to facilitate discussion. Questions which

contain images or movies should generally be classified as long as the data contained in the image or

movie will take time for the candidate to digest.