BEST PREDICTOR OF FINAL MARK

Introduction:
Biopharmacy and Pharmacokinetics (BP) is a subject provided in the third year of the Pharmacy studies, according to the syllabus of the University of Valencia. This module is organized in lectures where students learn basic concepts and later apply them in hands-on labs, seminars, and hands-on computer.
Our teaching team has designed a multi-tool evaluation model to assess the learning process of students from 2012-2013 until 2016-2017 academic years. Before the final exam, students must pass an examination of hands-on labs, seminars, and hands-on computer. The final qualification considers the mark previously obtained and theory exam. The use of these qualifications as predictors of the final grade would allow to anticipate and detect students with greater pedagogical needs, compared to other students with better skills and / or aptitudes. On the other hand, it would reveal whether contents and evaluation criteria are in line with the results in the theory mark. Therefore, the objective of this work is to establish a correlation between the qualifications of the theoretical contents versus the previous qualifications, obtained throughout the course.

Methods:
Individual marks of students from 2012-2013 until 2016-2017 academic years in BP were collected. Students with no qualification in one of the different exam categories were discarded in the analysis. 256 samples were included in the final dataset. Pearson coefficient was estimated for each correlation and non-linear regression including standard errors were added to the plots.

Results:
Three different correlations were obtained considering theoretical marks vs seminars, hands-on labs and hands-on computer. Qualifications from hands-on computer are better predictors of the final outcome (R=0.53) compared to seminars (R=0.31) and hands-on laboratory (R=0.18).

Conclusions:
These results confirm that hands-on developed in the computer sessions would allow to the teaching team to select the students that may result in a lower qualification in the theory exam throughout the academic years assessed. Moreover, hands-on laboratory is low correlated with the final qualification, which might reflect a less strict evaluation criteria or more affordable contents compared to the other disciplines.