Feedback regarding Paper II

Paper II 19 February 2008

The PTC has been contacted by a number of trainees who sat the Paper II exam on 19 February 2008.  Many candidates have expressed concern that the paper was significantly more difficult than expected and have questioned its validity.

The PTC has raised this issue with the examinations department.  The response from Professor Bateman, Chief Examiner, is below:

Thank you for raising these concerns as it is helpful to have the feedback.  It is not and will never be our intention to set an exam that is not relevant to the knowledge required to practice psychiatry. The main issue seems to be the level of difficulty of the exam itself although I accept there are also concerns about how to revise for the exam.  I would like to clarify one or two things for the PTC:

The new exam is not simply a replication of the old exam and it cannot be assumed by trainees that Paper I and II are linked in a straightforward way to the old Part 1.

All the questions are new and that itself raises a problem for trainees taking the exam (as well as for examiners setting the exam) as they are not aware of questions from past attempts and from other people who have taken the exam. Many trainees were part of a network who had a large number of representative questions from the old question bank which gave them some reassurance about the level of difficulty etc.

All the new questions were piloted with trainees who kindly took a mock exam so that we could look at the level of difficulty and reliability of many of the questions. These results informed us about the use of the questions and we discarded many and adapted some others.

The questions were standard set according to the Angoff Method.  Further details can be obtained here.

The pilot and the standard setting inform us about the level of difficulty of the exam and we will be looking at the pass mark taking that into account along with other statistics about the pattern of correct answers and the reliability of each question etc.

The relevance of the questions is important and we have many discussions about that. We will continue to revisit this aspect and take into account this feedback.

I would like to reassure trainees that the difficulty of the exam is recognized and will be taken into account in setting a pass mark.  We do not take into account a pass rate as the exam is standard set.

The exam department is unable to receive feedback or enter discussions directly from trainees but will continue to work with the PTC to ensure trainees’ views about the exams are represented.  If you have any comments regarding the exams that you feel the PTC should be aware of then please contact you local PTC rep or email ptc@rcpsych.ac.uk