Aims & Objective

·         To Analyse the difficulty level of items in summative assessment of MBBS students

·         To correlate the student performance to difficulty level of question paper.

Methodology

            University exam General surgery theory question papers were collected from December 2012 to June 2015. Items were stratified based on the cognitive load being tested according to simplified modified Bloom’s taxonomy. The raw scores of the students were obtained from the exam controller’s office. Both were analysed.

Results

            On an average, the questions tested 70% recall, 17% understanding and 17% problem solving ability. The performance of the students did not alter much according to the difficulty of the question paper.

Conclusions

Blue printing of question paper increases validity. Student discrimination is better with objective items. In spite of increase in higher order cognitive questions, the performance of students is the same.