Designing Objective Structured Clinical Examination in Basic Community Pharmacy Clerkship Course and Assessment of Its Relationship with Conventional Exam

Sep 20, 2026

Over 90% of pharmacy students work in community and hospital settings after graduation, requiring both knowledge and practical competence, making pharmacy clerkship a central training course. Conventional written exams mainly assess knowledge and often fail to evaluate clinical skills. This study evaluates whether an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) provides different skill assessment results from a conventional test and examines the relationship between their scores.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryHealthcare

FormatPDF

Pages4

Reading Time10 min

AccessFree to download

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusion

Introduction

Miller hierarchy and assessment methods

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[jpc.tums.ac.ir](jpc.tums.ac.ir) | | | | --- | --- | --- | | Designing Objective Structured Clinical Examination in Basic Community Pharmacy Clerkship Course and Assessment of Its Relationship with Conventional Exam
Leila Kouti 1, Mina Khezrian2, Armaghan Eslami3, MehrdadAssarian2, Hamid Zargar2, Masoud Mahdavinia2, Mohsen Kazemi2, Kaveh Eslami 1*
1 Clinical Pharmacy Department, School of Pharmacy, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran.
2 School of Pharmacy, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran.
3 School of Education and Psychology, Shahid Chamran University ofAhvaz, Ahvaz, Iran. | | | | A R T I C L E I N F O | | A B S T R A C T | | Article type: Original article | | Background: Over 90% of pharmacy students’ work in pharmacies after graduation which needs both knowledge and skill, thus one of the most essential courses of their education is pharmacy clerkship. An important part of an educational program is the evaluation of the trainees. Different studies show that conventional written exams are not successful in evaluating the skills of the students and can mostly evaluate their knowledge. Thus Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is used to evaluate the students in different aspects.
Methods: An OSCE and a conventional test were given to a group of students at the end of basic community pharmacy clerkship course. The OSCE test consisted of six different stations (reading prescriptions, identifying drugs, pharmacist’s recommendation, patient education, drug information resources, and drug usage instructions) . Two questions were asked at each station by different examiners. The scores and results of these tests were compared and analyzed.
Results: There was no significant correlation between OSCE final scores and written test scores (P: = 0.217) . No significant correlation between each station’s score and the written test score was found.
Conclusion: The absence of significant correlation between OSCE and conventional exams shows that the skills evaluated by OSCE cannot be evaluated by the best possible written tests. This type of examination is not commonly used in Iran’s pharmacy schools but due to the findings ofthis study, it seems that this multiform method, despite being more difficult to arrange, can be a more suitable and relevant way to evaluate basic community pharmacy clerkship compared to conventional written tests.
J Pharm Care 2014; 2 (3): 110-113 | | Keywords:
Educational Assessment Community Pharmacy Pharmacy Clerkship | | | | ► Please cite this paper as:
Kouti L, khezrian M, Eslami A, Assarian M, Zargar H, Mahdavinia M, Kazemi M, Eslami K. Designing Objective Structured Clinical Examination in Basic Community Pharmacy Clerkship Course and Assessment of Its Relationship with Conventional Exam. J Pharm Care 2014; 2(3): 110-113. | | | Introduction At the beginning, modern pharmacy was founded for educating specialists in formulating and compounding * Corresponding Author: Dr Kaveh Eslami Address: Department of Clinical Pharmacy, School of Pharmacy, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Golestan blvd., Ahvaz61357-33184, Iran. Tel:+986113738378, Fax: +98216113738381. [Email:kaveheslami@yahoo.com](Email:kaveheslami@yahoo.com) drugs. To this end, the pharmacy school was founded in 1930 to train expert human resources for formulating and compounding drugs (1) . As industrial processes in drug manufacturing developed, the role of pharmacists also transformed from medicine compounders to those responsible for distribution and dispensing of drugs to patients, in a way that most of the pharmacists assumed the responsibility of medicine supply management by Does Performance Assessment: Real patients, Videos, Logs, Undercover SPs, portfolios Shows How Competence Assessment: Observations, OSCEs, SPs Knows How Clinical Based Tests: PMP, Practicals, Essays, Orals Knows Tests

FAQs

What was the purpose of using OSCE in basic community pharmacy clerkship?

To evaluate pharmacy students in aspects that conventional written exams usually cannot assess well, focusing on practical skills across multiple stations.

How was the OSCE test structured in this study?

The OSCE included six stations—prescription reading, drug identification, pharmacist recommendation, patient education, drug information resources, and drug usage instructions—with two questions per station from different examiners.

What was the relationship between OSCE scores and conventional written test scores?

No significant correlation was found between OSCE final scores and written test scores, and station scores also showed no significant correlation with written results.

Sep 20, 2026

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