AMA advocacy on exam failures
The AMA and Dr Hash Abdeen, AMACDT Chair, have been working with RANZCP and RACP College Presidents, CEOs, and trainee committees in the wake of their respective exam disruptions to provide certainty to trainees about their ability to progress through training.
We continue to support RANZCP to implement measures to support trainees progress, including the implementation of an alternate retrospective assessment pathway to support progression and contingencies for future exam proofing.
Further we are supporting RACP trainees who were impacted by the disruptions to the Divisional Written Examination in February with the RACP implementing a range of measures to support trainees impacted by the exam failure including a refund of examination fees for those significantly impacted, allowing all candidates who failed to resit the examination with no further cost and a waiving of the rescheduled examination attempt.
Since November, AMACDT has received feedback from many RANZCP and RACP trainee members about the significant distress the exam failure and disruption has caused. One-off, high-stake barrier examinations are extremely stressful and take up to a year of personal and professional sacrifice. It is extremely disappointing for both trainees and supervisors that ongoing difficulties arise with virtual/online examination platforms with insufficient contingency planning in place.
We raised these issues at the Council of Presidents of Medical Colleges meeting on 17 February. This followed a joint letter from the AMACDT Chair and AMA President in December 2021 to Colleges emphasising the need for better collaboration to put in place systems to mitigate the risk of disruptions to examinations/assessment and to share learnings to ensure contingency plans are in place and communicated to trainees.
AMACDT has also discussed with the Australian Medical Council how improvements in this area can be strengthened as part of the process for accreditation of specialist education and training programs.
Lessons learnt from the pandemic was the subject of the first AMA Trainee Forum on 2 February where trainee representatives agreed it was important for Specialist Medical Colleges and trainees to strengthen collaboration to better share examples of policies and practices (both positive and negative) that have supported trainees to progress through training during the pandemic, and to discuss how this could continue as part of usual practice moving forward
In this the third year of the pandemic, trainees emphasised the importance of Medical Colleges and trainees learning from past experiences, sharing successes and failures, and working collaboratively to improve education and training, and to future proof systems to the extent possible against further disruption. The communiqué from the Forum is available here