Reproducibility of Oral Exam Grades and Correlation with Other Measures of Performance on Three Required Third-Year Clerkships

The oral examination is one of the traditional measures of student performance during clinical clerkships. Other studies have compared oral exams, written exams, and clinicalperformance, finding an unequal correlation among them and poor reproducibility of scores among examiners. This study of a third-year class on three required clerkships found a stronger correlation between oral exam performance and cumulative grade point average (GPA) than had previously been reported between oral exams and written or clinical grades and also found high reproducibility across clerkships, both overall and within class quartiles. These findings argue for wider use of the oral exam as an evaluation instrument on clinical clerkships.