During this selective experience, I had the opportunity to review test items for a Therapeutics II exam for P3 students at UAMS College of Pharmacy. The test items being reviewed examined the students' knowledge of drugs in pregnancy, hormonal contraception, hormone replacement therapy, and smoking cessation.
Date: November 7, 2024
Length of Activity: One hour
Prep Time: No preparation was required.
Learners: Third year pharmacy students at UAMS
Comfort Level: High
Reflection: I really enjoyed getting to participate in this activity because as someone who was in pharmacy school less than a year ago, I was able to look at the exam questions with both a student's perspective and with a newly licensed pharmacist's perspective. I was able to contribute input towards questions that were slightly confusing to read and make suggestions on how to re-word them so that they were easier to understand. I also thought it was neat that we had data to show how previous classes performed on each item. We looked at the item difficulty (what percentage of students answered the item correctly) and the point biserial (a correlation between how the students who did well on the exam as a whole performed on that particular item). This was important because if the item difficulty was high and the point biserial was negative, then it was suggestive that the item was probably poorly written. In other words, the students who performed well on the exam as a whole did poorly on that specific question. However, if the difficulty was high and the point biserial was positive, then it was suggestive that the question was a really great discriminator. This experience allowed me to see and participate in the "behind the scenes" of test writing.