8.4: Practique Server

New Features

Record and Review for OSCE exams

On request, you can now record audio of active speaker, video of candidate, examiner, role players and candidate screen share.
Once the exam with recording is complete, you will be able to download the recordings of any specific station you are interested in from the Practique administration pages.
If you wish to use this feature, please contact us to discuss the parameters of use.

Screen sharing

OSCEs can now be set up to include screen sharing, meaning that the candidate’s screen is shown as a video tile to the examiner. The examiner can enlarge the video tile or expand it to full screen providing them with a detailed view of the candidate’s screen.

Waiting room for OSCE exams with automatic timer

Up until now, running an OSCE exam with an automatic timer meant starting the session also starting the automatic rotation timer. The new waiting room facility in Practique gives you the option to set up a waiting room to admit candidates, examiners, role players and observers into their first station prior to the start of the exam.
Once all exam participants are ready, the exam administrator can start the exam and the automatic rotation timer from the logins screen.

Multiple cases per station

Practique now supports multiple cases within a single station. You can present the candidate with several clinical scenarios without changing the examiner or station.

New question type: Multiple Acceptable Answers (MAA)

MAA questions are now available in Practique. It gives you the option to create questions that provide candidates with multiple correct answer options.

Grade banding

Grade bands are now available, allowing you to categorise a candidate’s performance on a test. Each band is a range of scores defined by the exam administrators. Bands can be labelled to indicate what a candidate’s score equates to on your grading scale (Honours, A to F, numeric scale etc).
Grade bands can be set per exam.

Benchmark Based Standard Setting

The new Benchmark Based Standard Setting option allows for the calculation of exam standards based on cohort performance. Sub-cohorts can also be defined if cohorts are heterogeneous/multi-modal.
Standard benchmarks that are calculated include the mean, mean minus 1/2 standard deviations and median. Custom benchmarks can also be calculated and set. The system will plot a histogram of candidate cohort performance. Custom benchmarks can also be calculated and set. This method also allows for the use of Cohen standard setting.

Improvement on Candidate/Examiner interface

New Notes facility, allowing candidates and examiners to take notes relating to a specific station in an OSCE.
Improved resource viewer, incl. Prev and Next buttons for multi-page documents, full screen and close buttons, scroll bar to scroll on a single page.
Highlighting function, allowing candidates to highlight sections of text.
New tooltips on the image viewer button.
The user can adjust the size of the video tiles in OSCEs.
The user can enlarge video tile to full screen in OSCEs (including video tile for screen share).
The examiners/observers can indicate that they have validated the ID of a candidate, the validation is confirmed on the exam administration login screen.

Improvements for Examination admin pages

A new search facility on the Exam login screen, allowing free text search of all exam participants, their roles and their statuses.
New colour coding of exam participant status (logged in, ID not verified, Did Not Attend, Complete).
Additional exam detail information on the Exam administration login screen.

Other improvements

Item performance can now be shown per exam. The improvement includes distractor analysis for Single Best Answer items. Note that this feature requires configuration.
Practique now facilitates the exclusion of specific dimensions in the pre-filtering.