Awareness and Knowledge of Dental Teaching Faculty on OSCE/OSPE Examination: An Online Survey

Aims: Past many decades the traditional way of examining the students includes both short and long cases as well viva-voce examination. In the conventional assessment method, there are some voids found such as communication skills.

Study Design: A descriptive cross-sectional study was performed using a pre-designed questionnaire through Google forms.

Place and Duration of Study: Questionnaire distributed to the participants of various dental colleges across India through e-mails, and through Whats App, from 16th Feb 2022 to 30th March.

Methodology: The questionnaire was pre-tested, and validation was performed. A total of 501 responses were received from the participants. The received data was entered in Microsoft Excel sheet. Descriptive Statistical Analysis was done by using IBM SPSS version 26.

Results: A total of 501 faculty members participated. Senior Lectures stood in first place (153) and the least interest shown by the Readers (100). While gender wise designations follow as in Senior Lecturer designation dominated by the female faculty. 82.4% of faculty were aware about the OSCE and 77.8% claimed they knew about OSPE. More than half of the participated faculty revealed that they have not undergone any training programme to conduct OSCE/OSPE.

Conclusion: Very few of the Dental Institutions conduct the OSCE/OSPE programmes. Though there are many ways to test the student’s knowledge, no single method is superior to other methods. It is advisable to use a combination of methods for better results.