Assessment of clinical competence in medical education

Abstract

Although traditionally the main focus of medical education is to teach intensive conceptual knowledge, medical schools increasingly pay attention to the conveyance of clinical skills and attitudes that are required to become an excellent and complete physicians. Medical programs are obliged to assess the learning progress of their medical students with exams. Clinical skills or professional attitudes need wide range of different types of exams to be assessed. The search for a valid and reliable assessment of clinical skills and attitudes continues for a long time. In this article, different test methods designed to measure competency in clinical skills and attitudes in medical education are introduced.