Videotapes for undergraduate psychiatry examinations: Part II--Comparison with other methods of assessment.

The previous paper (Rix et al., 1985) described the production of two videotaped clinical examinations for use in assessing undergraduate medical students during their psychiatry clerkship. In this paper assessments by videotape are compared with conventional assessments available to the examiners. The highest correlations were between the videotape examination results and written multiple choice questionnaire results, suggesting that they test a common area of clinical competence: knowledge and interpretation of psychopathology. Videotape examination results correlated poorly or not at all with the teachers' global ratings and clinical examination results, which may be indicative of relative success in devising procedures for the assessment of fairly independent abilities.