Release notes 8.1.0 29-06-21

Owned by Hannah Pietruszewska
Last updated: Jan 25, 2024 by Melanie Whyte
7 min read

New Features

Exam Timing & Schedule (Written Exams)

You now have more control over exam timing within Practique.

The Practique upgrade allows the duration of an exam to be set on an individual and group level, and the exam will auto stop when the time is expired. 

To enable maximum control, you can set the timings of each phase of the exam e.g. reading time, and schedule messages that notify the candidate of how long they have remaining. Additionally, changes can be made to the duration mid exam, for example the allocation of extra time. 

To allow the monitoring of progress, there is full visibility of which question the candidates are on, how long they have spent on each question (which is calculated cumulatively ) and an indication if the candidate has experienced any connectivity issues. 

Exam Timing & Schedule (OSCE)

For OSCE exams, the upgrade allows you to optionally set timing of each stage within a station including the countdown to the reading time when the station is activated, plus the administration and marking time per station. Users see on screen timing notifications, and automatically rotate at the end of each station marking time before being connected to the next station. The benefit of this approach is that all users in the circuit are syncronised.

At the end of the session, the exam rotation is automatically unlocked. This feature allows users to navigate back to a particular station in the event of a re-run.

Exam Control

Exam control is the functionality that allows exam administrators to manage users who are taking an exam using Practique. The functionality allows administrators to remotely start, pause, stop and reset individual or group of users in an exam. With the implementation of exam control, administrators are also able to see more information related to the users that are sitting the exam including their start/idle time. The exam control functionality removes the requirement for a user to be sent a PIN to access the exam, unless a user is offline and cannot autostart.

Conditional release of resources [OSCE only]

When delivering OSCE exams, you sometimes want to assess candidate’s clinical decision making. Part of this involves deciding what investigations to run on a patient. As an examiner, you want to have the candidate ask for these investigations unprompted. Therefore, you do not want the candidate to see what the results of these investigations may be, before they ask for them. OSCE station resources can now be withheld from candidates until the examiner chooses to release them.

Online Marking (Written)

Practique now includes a marking flow for question types which require a person to assess the candidate’s response, for example, Short Answer Questions.

Markers are created as Examiners with the role of “Marker” or “Senior Marker”. They are automatically created as Practique Users and can be given a preferred language when multi-lingual exams are supported, or segregated within the item bank via blueprint dimensions.

Markers can be allocated to any question and, for multi-lingual exams, to only responses from candidates using the same preferred language. For any question, they can be allocated to mark responses from all candidates sitting the exam, or they can share the candidates with other markers via a marking group. When not in a marking group, 2 markers allocated to the same question will double-mark the responses.

When double marking is being used a Snr. Marker needs to be assigned to the question so that any difference between the two marks greater than the allowed discrepancy can be resolved. When the difference is less than the discrepancy then the marks are averaged.

Candidate responses are allocated randomly and anonymously to the markers, who may review and provisionally mark the response before returning later to confirm the mark. Once confirmed the mark cannot be altered by them.

When creating items in Practique model answers and marking criteria can be added to guide the markers in their assessment of the candidates' answers.

Remote Proctoring Support

Practique is now integrated with the Examity proctor service. When creating an exam and scheduling candidates their proctor sessions can be automatically scheduled on Examity. Access to proctoring is available to candidates after they log in to P4B. Once the proctor session has been established they will be automatically directed to their exam content.

Mark-Based Exam Blueprint

Practique allows the creation of exam blueprints which define the proportion of content in an exam related to a blueprint dimension and/or its categories. Previously, this was based on the number of questions that relate to a given area. This is sufficient for SBA exams, where each question is worth 1 mark. And in fact for any exam where the number of marks for each item is the same. However, some question types have differing numbers of marks. To better support this situation, we have extended the blueprinting criteria to allow the marks available for a question to be considered instead.

Resource Consent

When question authors are adding resources to questions or directly to the bank, they must ensure that they have the consent of the patient pictured. In order to do this, they ask patients to sign a paper form. Question authors are now able to upload a secondary document to a resource so that a signed consent form can be captured. Administrators are able to view these images to ensure that appropriate consent has been given for the resource.

Enemy Items

When developing items in the question bank, you may create very similar items that share some context or resources. Whilst both of these items can be valid within an assessment, if they are in the same exam it can be confusing for candidates (and compound candidate performance by context specificity). These items are referred to as 'enemies' of each other. You are now able to link items as enemies and Practique will alert you if your item set contains any enemies.

Remote OSCE (ROSCE)

The new ROSCE functionality within Practique has been created to allow the continuation of clinical assessments in a safe, secure environment when in-person assessment is not possible. The ROSCE has been trialled successfully with a number of customers over the last year and is now available to all Practique OSCE customers. Functionality includes:

Examiner View

The examiners are allocated to stations and communicate directly with candidates via secure video. The examiners can see instructions, mark scheme and live mark each candidate.

Candidate View

Candidates login and arrive at their allocated station. They can immediately access resources (optional - resources can be locked) and communicate directly with the examiner and roleplayer.

Roleplayer View

Roleplayers are allocated to stations and can communicate directly with candidates. The roleplayers can see instructions.

Rotation

In just one click the candidate moves to the next station, if they arrive early the examiner can hold them until they are ready.

You can see a short demo of the functionality here.

Resolved Support Requests

PSD - Practique Service Desk ticket ID

Beta 9

  • PSD-4172: Fixed issue with tagging of items to blueprint dimension where untagged theme was not available in ‘count as’.

  • PSD-4368: Speed optimisation and SQL query fixes to resolve filter not working on ‘not tagged’.

  • Fixed issue where clicking ‘save marks’ looped through all candidates not just the allocated number.

  • New rule for CSP to account for candidate failing a station but not the exam.

  • PSD-4099: Resolution mark was not updating if candidate marks were updated after the exam. When a mark is modified and there is a resolution mark already, the resolution mark is deleted and replaced by a new resolution one.

  • PSD-4385: When exporting marks from an OSCE we export 0.0 for empty values (where responses were not completed). We now export a blank value instead.

  • PSD-4386: Fixed bug with standard setting page export where excluded items were being included in the export.

  • Fixed pdf preview failing on a global marksheet.

Beta 10

  • Fixed in P4B OSCE if an examiner submitted a response when the candidate has stopped, the response was not automatically accepted.

  • Renamed ‘Case’ column to ‘item’ on received responses page.

  • PSD-4402: Fixed issue with marking criteria not showing.

Beta 11

  • Buttons on the assign marker page are now hidden if an exam is finalised.

  • Accept responses for exam that has been reset and the exam key is no longer valid. Return 200 instead of 404 so P4B can delete the exam.

  • Add ‘max score’ to the possible choice of marks in SAQ.

  • Simplified columns in exported results.

  • PSD-4400: re-enabled editing of examiner marking notes.

  • PSD-4399: It was possible when building an item set to allocate items to an exam that were from different variants instead of just the primary variant. This is fixed.

  • Backend support for ROSCE Timing.

  • Fixed refreshing causing marker allocation to change.

Beta 13 (8.1.0-rc.1)

  • Fixed combining exams with multi marking where information about preferred variants, variants stored in interview objects and item variants in the exam was not transferred through to the combined exam.

  • Fixed marker allocation in a multi-variant environment. When there were no candidates in second variant, the markers got assigned each candidate twice.

8.1.0-rc.2

  • PSD-4441 - Fixed Windows 10 Chrome issue where the combining of exams was not completing.

  • PSD-4446 - The session history allows adding new activity including a description. The description was not previously visible on the view activity page. This has now been added.

  • PSD-3069 - Fixed display bug where on force stopped exams, it appeared that marks had been entered where no marks had been entered.

8.1.0-rc.3

  • Fix - prevent empty value being passed from Shibboleth to the Practique backend.

  • Added the ability to export candidate responses in letter format in SBA.

  • Where exams are randomised - Added the ability to export candidates list of questions in the order that the candidate saw them in the exam.

  • Per exam pin for candidates, and allows editing users password from the view logins page (disabled by default).

  • Hidden View logins when the exam is not pushed to devices.

  • Fixed bug where session history could fail when there were 2 log items with the same time stamp.

  • Hidden the ‘forgotten password’ link when SSO is enabled as this was confusing to users thinking they can change their password through Practique. The password-reset page has been updated to explain SSO.