Test construction

Questions are produced by teachers of all disciplines contributing to the medical curricula at Groningen, Leiden, Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nijmegen. Each discipline is responsible for the content of the questions they contribute. Questions can be supplied with a reference to literature for study purposes and to check the answer key.

Every faculty has its own progress test evaluation committee (VBC), consisting of a chair and members from the basic and clinical sciences. The committee judges the questions produced by the teachers at their school. So, before being added to the database questions are judged by at least one of the five local progress test committees. The committees check questions for correctness of content and clarity of wording. They also consider the relevance of questions to basic doctors. If required the committee discusses a question with the discipline in question, after which a question may be modified or removed. The questions approved by the local committee are stored in a database together with questions from previous tests. The difficulty of novel questions is tested during the adaptive Progress Test. These novel questions do not count for the student’s test score.

Teachers from the participating schools are responsible for the production of progress test questions. Selecting questions for a test based on the test blueprint (with guidelines for the distribution of questions among different categories and disciplines) is the responsibility of the central progress test committee. The committee selects test questions in accordance with the blueprint and checks if these questions are interrelated or if the stem of one question contains the answer to another question.