This petition is regarding the illegitimate nature of question number one (please see picture given above) on the FCPS Part 2 Community medicine exam, which was held on Wednesday 23rd October 2019 at Regional centers of CPSP.

This question appears to be taken from a survey that was originally published in 1963 by Rand McNally & Company in the Handbook of Research on Teaching and reprinted in 1966 (see appendix 1). The information required to answer this question does not fall into the realms of any recommended reading nor is it the part of CPSP’s official regular training curriculum thereby making it impossible, for our supervisors to have us exposed to this information or for us, students, to have learnt it. The point of a fellowship exam (or any exam) is to gauge the competency of a student in regards to a set amount of information in a particular field. However, if the material inquired is irrelevant this will unfortunately render the purpose of the assessment null and void. Students in good faith trust that the examination paper being set will adhere to the published specification boundaries and learning objectives. However, when this is not the case as we experienced on 23rd October, many of us were left feeling that we were unable to present the fruits of our labor or in other words; demoralized and frustrated. As trainees we have nothing but sincere concerns for our specialization and we request our discontent to be addressed as soon as possible. We urge that this particular question is to be considered void and the marks are moderated accordingly.

It is vital that the CPSP upholds its rigorous examination standards and that their assessments continue to be reliable indicator of one’s merit and hard work. However, most of our seniors who have appeared in exams previously and even those who have passed agree that this exam process is not a very standardized method of assessing required skills of a candidate. Many questions are taken from random websites, from unpopular articles and pictures, making it near to impossible for anyone having been exposed to this type of web content. Unfortunately, this exam content does not correspond with the FCPS curriculum given by CPSP. The curriculum and the training method are another debate; they seem to be deficient in many ways as agreed upon by all trainees. We all feel the need of having our curriculum updated regularly, adding recent national public health issues at fixed times in a year.  We humbly request CPSP to review deficiencies in our subject training and exam, more specifically defining boundaries for internet-based questions.

Thank you!

Appendix

1.       Source(EXPERIMENTAL AND QUASI-EXPERIMENT Al DESIGNS FOR RESEARCH DONALD T. CAMPBELL Syracuse University JULIAN C. STANLEY Johns Hopkins University)

Link:
Campbell&Stanley-1959-Exptl&QuasiExptlDesignsForResearch.pdf