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Academic and Student Services

Assessments

About ExamSoft

About ExamSoft

ExamSoft is MCW's secure exam platform that enables to more efficient exam creation, delivery, analyzation, and management.

ExamSoft is an electronic exam testing suite. It allows Course Directors and Coordinators to build and store exam questions, allows students to take the exam, and enables OEI to complete exam scoring.

What Can ExamSoft Do?

  • Scrambles exam questions and/or answers
  • Blocks students from accessing other programs while taking their exam
  • Provides instant  exam results
  • Identifies at-risk students and individual strengths and weaknesses
  • Generates custom reports  for faculty
  • Replicates USMLE format 

ExamSoft Question Bank

ExamSoft offers a question bank, a collection of questions allowing users to create, preview, and edit previously created exam questions. Question banks are a great way to organize and manage your questions while keeping them stored in one secure place. Exam questions are written by many different faculty members throughout the School of Medicine, the School of Pharmacy, the Masters of Science in Anesthesia program, and specific Graduate School programs. Once questions are created in ExamSoft, they can be added to assessments quickly and easily.

ExamSoft’s question bank allows questions to be tagged by different categories. Currently, we are in the process of tagging questions by their associated lecture topics. By tagging the questions in this manner, users can see the alignment between lectures and assessment when searching data for the LCME and other purposes. For example, the School of Medicine tags questions using the MCW Global Competencies as well as the USMLE Content Codes. The tagging process provides a simple way for course directors to align questions with learning objectives to assist in curriculum development and assessment.

Security procedures call for rotating in new questions at each examination. The MCW recommendation is to replace 20% of questions with new questions to ensure continued security. Beyond security concerns, ExamSoft’s question bank provides informational statistics that give course directors the ability to assess question performance and identify opportunities for improvement. In this way, ExamSoft’s features help us ensure we are providing high-quality, secure examinations to our students.

Resources

Questions?

Contact exams@mcw.edu.

Constructing Written Test Questions for the Basic and Clinical Sciences

Constructing Written Test Questions for the Basic and Clinical Sciences

Resource from the National Board of Medical Examiners
Read "Constructing Written Test Questions for the Basic and Clinical Sciences"
Test Blueprinting
Objective Structured Clinical Examinations
Item Writing Workshop (Kaplan)

Item Writing Workshop (Kaplan)

Two hour session from 2/16/2015 by Dr. Alice Akunyili, the Associate Director of Clinical Academics at Kaplan Medical.

In this role, she leads the efforts to create a clinically relevant and integrated medical curriculum. She has worked with several Medical schools to evaluate their clinical skills curriculum and provide recommendations. She is also on the Kaplan faculty roster for Biostatistics and Epidemiology, and the co-creator of a remedial basic science course for Medical students. During her tenure with Kaplan Medical she has helped thousands of doctors pass the USMLE and successfully navigate the process of medical licensing in United States with her test taking strategy classes and road to residency seminars. Dr. Akunyili is passionate about educating faculty and students about the relevance of clinical problem solving to board exams.

Presentation by Dr. Alice Akunyili
Multiple Choice Questions

Multiple Choice Questions

How to use Application Questions on multiple-choice exams to assess an examinee's ability to use "recalled" knowledge. 
Multiple Choice Questions
Test Item Writing

Test Item Writing

Tips from writing questions for tests. 
Test Item Writing
Writing Single-Best Answer MCQs

Writing Single-Best Answer MCQs

Tips from writing a question stem, lead-in, response option and plausible distractors. 
Writing single-best answer MCQs