Development of a student grading rubric and testing for interrater agreement in a doctor of chiropractic competency program.

OBJECTIVE: Clinical competency is integral to the doctor of chiropractic program and is dictated by the Council of Chiropractic Education accreditation standards. These meta-competencies, achieved through open-ended tasks, can be challenging for interrater agreement among multiple graders. We developed and tested interrater agreement of a newly created analytic rubric for a clinical case-based education program.
METHODS: Clinical educators and research staff collaborated on rubric development and testing over four phases. Phase 1 tailored existing institutional rubrics to the new clinical case-based program using a 4-level scale of proficiency. Phase 2 tested the performance of the pilot rubric using 16 senior intern assessments graded by four instructors using pre-established grading keys. Phases 3 and 4 refined and retested rubric versions 1 and 2 on 16 and 14 assessments, respectively.
RESULTS: Exact, adjacent, and pass/fail agreements between six pairs of graders were reported. The pilot rubric achieved 46% average exact, 80% average adjacent, and 63% pass/fail agreements. Rubric version 1 yielded 49% average exact, 86% average adjacent, and 70% pass/fail agreements. Rubric version 2 yielded 60% average exact, 93% average adjacent, and 81% pass/fail agreements.
CONCLUSION: Our results are similar to those of other rubric interrater reliability studies. Interrater reliability improved with later versions of the rubric likely attributable to rater learning and rubric improvement. Future studies should focus on concurrent validity and comparison of student performance with grade point average and national board scores.