I understand the purpose of giving pretests before a lecture, to gauge how much the students have learned. But if it's a lecture on a fairly obscure topic, it starts to seem a little more pointless...
When I was in residency, we had a lecture on SSEPs. SSEP stands for Somatosensory Evoked Potential, which is probably more than I could have told you about them prior to that lecture. Anyway, before the lecture, we had a "pretest" that asked us a bunch of multiple choice questions about SSEPs and how they're used in prognostic testing.
Me (whispering): "Have you ever heard of SSEP?"
Resident next to me: "No."
Me: "So how are we supposed to take a test about them?"
I looked at the first question and it was asking what sort of response in an SSEP is a poor prognostic sign in brain injury. I looked over at the resident next to me, who appeared to be filling in answers.
Me: "Uh... what are you basing those answers on then??"
Apparently I wasn't alone in my cluelessness, because when they graded the pretest, the residents actually scored WORSE than we would have based on chance alone.
All of our SAMs (Self Assessment Modules we have to pay for and keep up with for maintenance of certification (MOC)) have pretests and posttests. I feel like the pretests are way silly. I guess they want to demonstrate improvement. Easy to improve on zero knowledge.
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