Unexpected events affecting the delivery of postgraduate medical exams
This guidance is for organisations responsible for developing and delivering postgraduate medical exams that are required for the award of a certificate of completion of training (CCT). It sets out our expectations and the actions that should be taken when there are exceptional issues in the delivery of those exams.
Purpose of the guidance
We are responsible for setting and maintaining standards for medical education, which includes approving and quality assuring postgraduate exams and programmes of assessment within curricula leading to the award of a CCT. It is the role of the royal college, faculty or developing organisation to design and deliver exams which uphold our standards.
Unforeseen issues may arise during delivery and this guidance is intended to support organisations to understand our expectations, manage the risks of unexpected events, and to know when to report incidents.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of examples of issues that could occur:
- Human errors, such as mixing up mark sheets of candidates or manually transcribing an incorrect mark.
- Papers lost or damaged in transit. There is evidence or reason to suspect that the security of the exam questions has been compromised.
- A pattern of cheating has been detected.
- There is a change in pass rate that is unexpected and outside the normal range for that exam.
- Technical issues, particularly with exams that are delivered remotely, eg answers not recorded, connection and network capacity problems affecting a large number of candidates.
- Procedural irregularities in individual centres, eg the exam was delivered in a way that was different to the agreed model for all centres, or that was communicated to candidates in advance.
- Practical issues requiring the cancellation of entire exam days, eg power cuts, flooding etc.
- A significant proportion of the exam material, eg stations in a clinical exam, or questions in a knowledge based assessment, needs to be removed from the results determination process.
