Publication

Abstract : Background and objective: The COVID 19 pandemic has had its impact on all aspects of life globally, andmedical education was no exception. As E-learning and assessment became the new norms in education under this scenario, the Medical Education Department of a teaching hospital under a deemed university felt the need to study the satisfaction and usefulness of online assessment, as perceived by the undergraduate medical students. Method: This was an observational study. A questionnaire based survey developed by the faculty members of the Medical Education Department was content validated and reliability tested using Cronbach’s alpha. Based on the pilot conducted the sample size calculated was 26 but we could get responses from 178 students covering four phases of undergraduate medical course. The questionnaire was administered as Google forms to the study subjects. Statistical analysis was done using IBM SPSS 20 (SPSS Inc, Chicago, USA). Results: More than half of the participants were moderately satisfied with the current online modalities and felt it was useful in assessing their knowledge level. But majority opined that online assessment was not useful in testing their clinical and practical skills. Conclusion: Despite many practical challenges faced during online assessment like network and connectivity issues, students have accepted it as the way forward. Though a good majority of them have found the present methods quite satisfactory, they have put forward suggestions, like having a greater number of MCQs and Vivavoce and automatic time out sessions to improve the fairness and quality of online assessments.