Different Assessment Tools for Evaluating Objective Structured Clinical Examinations in Medical Education: A Rapid Review

In the last three decades, the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) has seen exponential growth in usage in undergraduate and postgraduate examinations worldwide. This review aims to identify the different assessment tools for objective structured clinical examinations, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of tools in medical education. The results of the review showed that the most well-known type of test in the family of objective structured tests is the OSCE.However, although the general and basic principles of OSC are the same, the way of conducting ‎the test or the applied field is sometimes so different that the examiners prefer to use other names for these ‎tests, ‎such as OSCA, USNLE, iOSCE, OSATS, OSVE, TOSCE, OSPE, OSLE, and OSTE. The results showed that this multiplicity of nomenclature may be unnecessary except for a few cases, such as OSVE and TOSCE, which have specific structural differences from the original OSCE. For the rest of the cases, the same OSCE can be used. Each assessment tool has advantages and limitations, and there is no assessment method to obtain a comprehensive picture of student performance. For a comprehensive evaluation of the ability level of a student, multiple tools should be used longitudinally instead of a single tool.