Handbook for setting up courses

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

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.

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