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Medical student’s perspective on success in OSCE by sitting after our peers

We as final year medical students read with great interest the article titled “Gaining an advantage by sitting an OSCE after your peers: A retrospective study” (Ghouri et al. 2018) and gained a great understanding of the authors perspective. It is plausible to consider that students taking an examination after their peers exposes these candidates to potential opportunities to analyze or learn the contents of the examination and formulate potential answers, giving them a lead over students not exposed to the examination (Smith 2000). This is something many medical students have reported and such discussions exist in medical students’ forums. In our experience as medical students, we feel that those students who do the OSCE first and pass the contents to the students doing it later on, could increase anxiety levels if the student is not prepared. In addition to this, the time frame between the first OSCE date and the next could perhaps be short and therefore not provide enough time to prepare for the examination or study the passed-on information. This is also true for certain skills, such as catheter insertion. If the candidate were to know that this station was coming up, it would not benefit the individual who has not practiced this skill before. It could, instead, lead to anxiety and may have a negative impact on the other stations, rather than success. Furthermore, if a student who has taken a history and diagnosed it incorrectly but then passes this information on, it may lead to a fixed history taking and subsequently missing other important information. Such a scenario would, again, lead to candidates losing marks. Furthermore, there are also global scores from the patients. Hence, even if the candidate knows what stations are being examined, their own personal attitude, empathy and understanding, is something that cannot be fixed days before the exam.