Exam Results Published 

College News
19 February 2019

Congratulations to all the GP registrars who have just found out they passed their GP Education Programme exams. Late last year 233 trainee GPs participated in the exams, and it’s been an anxious wait to find out if they have successfully completed their first year of GP training.

The pass rate for the clinical exam was 72.2% and the pass rate for the written exam was 90.69%.

Acting Chief Executive Terina Moke says the exam results, which were emailed to participants on 18 February, are a key milestone for doctors completing the College’s vocational training and are the culmination of an enormous amount of work.

“In addition to two three-hour written papers, all first-year registrars do a clinical exam where they complete 10 simulated clinical cases,” says Terina.

“These are realistic GP consults, where registrars are observed working with actors who present a range of symptoms and use a variety of ways of interacting,” she says.

“We recognise registrars put a lot of work into their study and exam preparation. We hope they’ll all be very pleased with their results.

“I’d like to thank everyone from the College who was involved in running the exams – it’s a huge undertaking which involves a lot of hard work from our examiners, staff, GP teachers and medical educators.

“It’s very exciting for us to have another cohort of registrars achieve this important milestone as they journey towards becoming a Fellow of the College.”
 

Fun facts about the clinical exams:

  • 233 candidates 
  • 40 actors 
  • 40 examiners
  • 10 clinical cases 
  • 8 senior examiners 
  • 8 staff
  • 6 exam days 

Marking procedure

An independent psychometrist is contracted to compute the pass and cut scores.  For the written exam, the Rasch scoring method is used to compare the performance of the 2018 candidates with the 2017 cohort on similar test items.  In the clinical exam, the pass and cut scores are calculated using borderline scores. This is achieved by calculating the reliability (Cronbach alpha) of the exam case sets, the standard deviation of borderline scores and the standard error of measurement.