A clinical performance assessment for a third-year required clerkship in family medicine

In planning a new family medicine clerkship, a clinical performance examination (CPE) using focused encounters was included in the student evaluation. This format was believed to best reflect the types of experiences that students would be exposed to during the primarily ambulatory care family medicine clerkship. Methods: Testing scenarios were representative of either the problem-based cases on which the curriculum had been developed or the 20 common problems seen in family medicine. To date, 175 students have taken the CPE, each completing two cases. Results: The first year of experience indicates that there are no differences in student performance between periods and that students do not perform differently on the first case than they do on the second. No significant effect for scenarios was found. Examiner effects have been found, however. Conclusion: These effects suggest a need for further work in standardizing the scoring of the examination.