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Docimologic analysis of child psychiatry examination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2025

S. Bourgou
Affiliation:
Faculty of Medicine of Tunis, Tunis
N. Boujelbene
Affiliation:
Faculty of Medicine of Tunis, Tunis
N. Ben Salah
Affiliation:
Faculty of Medicine of Tunis, Tunis
G. Amira*
Affiliation:
Child psychiatry Department, Mongi Slim Hospital, La Marsa, Tunisia
*
*Corresponding author.

Abstract

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Introduction

Docimology is the science that assesses the quality of tests and items, based on different indices and coefficients.

Objectives

The purpose of our study was to perform a docimological analysis, based on docimological indices, of the items and exams of Child psychiatry of psychiatry certificates porposed for the students of the Third Year of the Second Cycle of Medical Studies in the Faculty of Medicine of Tunis.

Methods

We carried out a retrospective and descriptive study. We have included the scores of main sessions’ psychiatry certificate exam of six academic years (2016-2017 to 2021- 2022). We did not include the scores of this certificate obtained at the control sessions during the period of our study. We carried out a global docimological analysis of the psychiatry exam, of the child psychiatry exam and its items.

Results

We included a total of 2780 exam scripts spread over 12 main sessions. We found an annual pass rate of 96.7% in the psychiatry certificate and 85.3% in the discipline of child psychiatry. The study of the internal homogeneity of the psychiatric tests showed that the Alpha index of Cronbach varied between 0.64 and 0.82 with an average index of 0.74 which corresponds to an internal homogeneity at least acceptable. We found that the maximum scores obtained in the discipline of child psychiatry varied from 16.5 to 19.75 out of 20. The average rate of students, who passed the psychiatry certificate test without passing the discipline child psychiatry, was 11.9%. The questions were easy in 51.7% (62 questions) ans have at least good discrimination in 31.7%. We found also that 25 questions (65,7%) were “ideal”.

Conclusions

Child psychiatry examination in the Faculty of Medicine of Tunis meets globally the docimologic recommendations. This is the first step to build up a bank of items regularly enriched with “ideal” questions with metric qualities known in advance.

Disclosure of Interest

None Declared

Information

Type
Abstract
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of European Psychiatric Association
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