Station Number and Reliability in an Undergraduate Objective Structured Clinical Examination
Department of Medical Education, Medical College, Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Corresponding Author: Thomas J, Doctus Journal of Medical Education.
Abstract
Objective structured clinical examinations are widely adopted but frequently run with too few stations to be reliable. We analysed results from six examinations involving 740 candidate-sittings, computing generalisability coefficients across varying station counts. Reliability reached the conventional threshold for high-stakes decisions only beyond fourteen stations of ten minutes; examinations of eight stations fell well short. Increasing examiners per station improved reliability far less than adding stations, because candidate performance varied more across cases than across examiners. Institutions constrained on resources gain more by running more, shorter stations than by double-marking a small number.
Keywords
OSCE; Reliability; Generalisability Theory; Assessment; Station Number; Clinical Examination
How to Cite
Thomas J and Pal D. “Station Number and Reliability in an Undergraduate Objective Structured Clinical Examination”. Doctus Journal of Medical Education 1.1 (2026): 11-26.
Copyright and Licence
© 2026 Thomas J. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.