Terminology used in Practique

Owned by David Fairbank
Last updated: Oct 21, 2015 by Pavel KuncVersion comment

Here is an overview of the terminology used throughout Practique. This may help you to align your own exams setup to how we present them within the system.

Definitions

Item
A general term covering stations (OSCE) and questions (written exams).

Item Set
A collection of Items to be used in an exam. This can be re-used over multiple exams.

Exam
One or more Item Sets scheduled into an exam on a specified date.

Blueprint categories
Individual tags that you can create and attach to your Items throughout the system to enable in depth reporting.

Criteria
These are the statements that the examiner is providing feedback to the candidate against. For example 'candidate greets the patient fully'. 

Mark scheme
Each criteria is assigned a mark scheme which are the individual grades that examiners can give to candidates. Each scheme has a different group of grades, for example "Pass, Borderline, Fail". 

Mark sheet
The list of specified criteria and their associated mark schemes make up the mark sheet for each Item throughout the system. Mark sheet consists of both globally defined criteria and criteria defined on the particular Item.


Exams

Exam venue candidate capacity 
This is the maximum number of candidates that your exam venue can accommodate per circuit.

Exam block
Exam block groups Sessions together. One block can accommodate one Item set. Increasing the number of exam blocks in one day allows you to run multiple Item sets on the same exam day.

Session
Sessions are run sequentially and contain a group of one or more circuit(s). Usually multiple sessions will allow different groups of candidates to take the same exam on the same day.

Circuit
Circuits are run concurrently and are attached to a particular session. The number of candidates each circuit can contain is dependent on your Exam venue candidate capacity setting.

Round
The duration of one regular station, at the end of which usually the candidate or examiner will rotate to follow on to the next station in their schedule.

Floor marshal
Each circuit is led by one floor marshal. This person will have the responsibility of monitoring the rate of mark submissions from examiners and advancing the exam rounds in online mode. 

Standard setting method
Choose between Angoff, Ebel, Borderline Group and Borderline Regression. Read more about this here

Levenshtein threshold
The number of characters difference between the response given by a candidate and the correct response as stored in Practique. For example, a candidate response of 'ethnol' and a correct answer of 'ethanol' would have a Levenshtein distance of 1. By increasing the value of the Levenshtein threshold in VSAQ Items you can account for and accommodate responses from candidates which may simply mis-spelled.