Abstract:

Background:
Accurate assessment of medical students is crucial for ensuring their competency in knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Traditional assessment methods at Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine (PNTU) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, rely on relative standards, which may lack validity and reliability. To address this, the Angoff method, a type of absolute standard setting, was implemented to determine pass scores for Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) stations assessing Body Mass Index (BMI) and Waist-Hip Ratio (WHR).

Methods:
The study involved selecting and training Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to apply the Angoff method. They estimated the performance of Minimally Competent Candidates (MCCs) for each item on the checklist used in the BMI and WHR assessment stations. Content Validity Index (CVI)" and "Content Validity Ratio (CVR) were calculated to ensure the checklist's validity. The predicted difficulty values were averaged to determine the pass scores.

Results:
The SMEs' estimates resulted in a pass score of 8.5 for the BMI and WHR OSCE stations. Applying this standard revealed a significant discrepancy with traditional methods: only 27% of students passed using the Angoff-derived pass score, compared to a 100% pass rate under the relative standard approach.

Conclusion:
Implementing the Angoff method highlighted the inadequacies of traditional relative standard setting, demonstrating the necessity for more reliable and valid assessment methods. The study advocates for integrating absolute standard-setting techniques like the Angoff method to enhance the evaluation process in medical education, thereby improving the quality of training and patient safety.

Keywords:

Standard Setting, Angoff Method, OSCE, BMI, WHR, Medical Education, Assessment, SMEs.