Reality or simulation? Performance analysis of medical students through different practical assessments

Abstract: Introduction: Assessing clinical skills represents a challenge in medical training. The heterogeneity in the selection of patients associated to a lack of objective criteria has resulted in a methodological shift toward using the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE). Objective: This study aimed to identify whether the OSCE results in a Gaussian frequency distribution of performance assessment marks compared to the traditional model. Method: 239 students from the Semiotics module of the medicine course between 2016 (traditional model) and 2017 (OSCE) were analyzed using the two-dimensional Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Student’s t-test for correlation with the performance coefficient (PC). Results: The test scores in the traditional model (p