Technical glitches during exams have left hundreds of trainee medical specialists in the lurch and unable to move on to advanced training and specialisation.
On Monday, about 120 specialty medical trainees sitting an online written exam – which cost thousands of dollars to sit – were affected by technical failures that meant they could not complete what was, for many of them, their final exam. The Divisional Written Exam is only held once a year and sitting it is a requirement to enter specialty fields such as paediatrics, geriatrics, neurology and cardiology.
It is not the first issue the Royal Australian College of Physicians (RACP) has had with online exams, with a catastrophic technical error in 2018 forcing a whole cohort of trainee doctors to resit a crucial test.
Regarding the latest glitch, an RACP spokesperson said students were affected by logon delays or other IT issues for one of the two exams.
“No examination data has been lost,” the spokesperson said.
“We appreciate this is a very stressful situation for our trainees, and we are sorry that they have had this experience. We are reaching out to each of the affected trainees to understand the impact this had and how we can support them to resit the exam next month.”
Meanwhile, 200 psychiatry trainees could not complete a compulsory online examination, the Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE), in November due to a technical failure that the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) said it was still investigating. Many of those students are still waiting to find out how to proceed.
One final-year psychiatry registrar told Guardian Australia: “This was against a background of two years of bungled examination processes which has left a bottleneck of doctors unable to gain their final qualifications to practise as psychiatrists.
“Some trainees reported having attempted to sit this final examination up to five times over the [last] two years, but could not do so as the RANZCP cancelled or significantly downscaled the number of examination spots available on each occasion.”
The RANZCP president-elect, Dr Elizabeth Moore, said Covid had disrupted the psychiatry exams over the past two years, but the November exam had been affected by a technical issue still under investigation in which the online platform failed.
The exam was a clinical examination broken into parts known as “stations”, with breaks between each. Trainees can complete this exam at any point from several months into their traineeship, but many opt to do it towards the end of their training as their final exam.
The trainees affected by the technical glitch were able to complete their first stations in the morning, but were unable to log on and complete the afternoon component.
However, Moore said the RANZCP had developed an alternative assessment pathway to help many of those students affected, in consultation with trainees. If they were assessed as having passed the two stations they had completed in the morning, they were given a pass for the whole exam.
Those who failed the stations had their portfolio of work reviewed by assessors to look at the trend in their work over time and to see if they had reached the standards required for passing the exam. “If educationists were satisfied the data was there to support their competency, then they were also passed on the exam,” Moore said.
The remaining students are being reviewed on a case-by-case basis, Moore said, a process which is still under way.
A separate technical error led to some students receiving a message late in 2021 that they had passed the November exam when they in fact had not. “All we can do is apologise for that,” Moore said.
Moore rejected that the cancellations and technical failures were contributing to shortages of psychiatry specialists, slowing the entry of new staff into an already overwhelmed mental health system.
If anything, the alternative assessment arrangements RANZCP had implemented as a result of the glitch was ensuring trainees were advancing, she said. However, the whole examination system is under review, she added, including how to make exams less stressful and onerous on trainees.
