We wanted to test the progress of medical students at our university in a pharmacology course. The formal teaching was given as lectures to the full class of students. We gave the very same written test of multiple-choice (MC) questions (single best choice) to third-year medical students before and after a one semester course of basic pharmacology. The initial voluntary test (containing 30 MC questions) was taken by 79% of the eligible students (n = 147), a week before pharmacology lectures had started. Defining a passing grade of 60% of right answers, only 2% of the students passed the test. The range was between 5 and 21 points. The final, now obligatory, written test at the end of the course (one week after the last lecture in pharmacology) was taken by all students in the semester (n = 179) and was passed by 95%, of students, again defined by the same passing score. Here, the points obtained ranged from 12 to 29. Over the time of the semester, the attendance in the lectures dropped dramatically to less than 10% of the students. Hence, progress tests are useful, but they hardly measure the gain in knowledge through attendance in the pharmacology lecture (the intervention); they also measure other sources of knowledge, such as textbook reading or memorizing only the initial questions and looking up the answers.

中文翻译：

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在药理学课程中使用前置式书面笔试极大地提高了医学生在最终书面笔试中的表现

我们希望通过药理学课程来测试我们大学医学系学生的学习进度。正式的教学作为对全体学生的授课形式。我们在一学期的基础药理学课程之前和之后，对三年级医学生进行了相同的多项选择题（单项最佳选择）的笔试。在药理学讲座开始前一周，有79％的合格学生（n = 147）参加了最初的自愿测试（包含30个MC问题）。正确答案的合格分数为60％，只有2％的学生通过了考试。范围在5点到21点之间。课程结束时（最后一次药理学讲座之后的一周），该课程最后（现在是必修）的笔试由该学期的所有学生参加（n = 179），并由95％的学生通过，再次由相同的及格分数定义。在这里，获得的分数在12到29之间。在整个学期中，参加讲座的人数急剧下降，不到10％的学生。因此，进度测试是有用的，但它们很难通过参加药理学讲座（干预）来衡量知识增益。他们还测量其他知识来源，例如教科书阅读或仅记住最初的问题并查找答案。