Dear Examiner,

Re: Request to all MRCS examiners to submit new questions for the MRCS Part A Multiple Choice Question Bank

 

Firstly, we would like to thank you for your time, dedication and enthusiasm in surgical assessment for the four surgical Royal Colleges. However, we would be grateful if you would now assist the Intercollegiate Committee for Basic Surgical Examinations (ICBSE) with some additional activity in relation to the MRCS Part A (multiple choice) examination. As a consequence of the remote delivery of the examination, there has been an increase in the reproduction of question material within the public domain. To maintain the validity and standard of the assessment we will need to rapidly change, and increase the size of, the MCQ question bank.

 

We would be grateful if you would consider submitting five or six MCQ questions on topics of your interest covering either basic sciences or clinical questions within your area of specialism that lie within the curriculum as defined in the new Intercollegiate Surgical Curriculum Programme. https://www.iscp.ac.uk/iscp/curriculum-2021

 

As a short summary and to maintain consistency with the house-style of the question bank any question should have a short lead in stem with a clinical vignette defining a single clearly defined problem. There must be five possible answers in a single best answer format.

 

General points to consider include:

  • Use simple, precise and unambiguous wording.
  • Use plausible distractors that actually exist.
  • Avoid clues wherever possible to the correct answer.
  • Consider topics to emphasise higher-order thinking.
  • Keep options of a similar length (avoiding one short or very long answer).
  • Avoid negatives wherever possible.
  • Avoid options such as “all of the above” or “none of the above” 

We have included some exemplar questions (attached) for you to consider but we appreciate this is not an easy task. The current Paper Panel are actively engaged in this process by editing and modifying the current questions. However, we need your support in extending the question bank.

 

The timescale is unfortunately limited and we would ask if questions could be submitted by the end of December 2021. Once you have constructed your questions, we would be grateful if they could be emailed to the examination teams at your affiliated College from where they will be forwarded to the ICBSE office in London. In due course, we would aspire to giving feedback on how the questions that you have written performed in future diets of the examination.

 

Once again, we would wish to thank you for your ongoing work on behalf of ICBSE.

 

Yours sincerely,