Adjusting to Disrupted Assessments, Placements and Teaching (ADAPT): a snapshot of the early response by UK medical schools to COVID-19

  1. Anmol Arora
  2. Georgios Solomou
  3. Soham Bandyopadhyay
  4. Julia Simons
  5. Alex Osborne
  6. Ioannis Georgiou
  7. Catherine Dominic
  8. Shumail Mahmood
  9. Shreya Badhrinarayanan
  10. Syed Rayyan Ahmed
  11. Jack Wellington
  12. Omar Kouli
  13. Robin Jacob Borchert
  14. Joshua Feyi-Waboso
  15. Scott Dickson
  16. Savraj Kalsi
  17. Dimitrios Karponis
  18. Timothy Boardman
  19. Harmani Kaur Daler
  20. Abbey Boyle
  21. Jessica Speller
  22. Conor S Gillespie
  23. Jie Man Low
  24. Ratnaraj Vaidya
  25. Ngan Hong Ta
  26. Steven Aldridge
  27. Jonathan Coll Martin
  28. Natasha Douglas
  29. Mary Goble
  30. Tayyib Abdel-Hafiz Goolamallee
  31. Emma Jane Norton
  32. Andre Chu
  33. Inshal Imtiaz
  34. Oliver P Devine

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Abstract

Background

Medical school assessments, clinical placements and teaching have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The ADAPT consortium was formed to document and analyse the effects of the pandemic on medical education in the United Kingdom (UK), with the aim of capturing current and future snapshots of disruption to inform trends in the future performance of cohorts graduating during COVID-19.

Methods

Members of the consortium were recruited from various national medical student groups to ensure representation from medical schools across the UK. The groups involved were: Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management Medical Students Group (FMLM MSG); Neurology and Neurosurgery Interest Group (NANSIG); Doctors Association UK (DAUK); Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) Student Members Group and Medical Student Investigators Collaborative (MSICo.org). In total, 29 medical schools are represented by the consortium. Our members reported teaching postponement, examination status, alternative teaching provision, elective status and UK Foundation Programme Office (UKFPO) educational performance measure (EPM) ranking criteria relevant to their medical school during a data collection window (1st April 14:00 to 2nd April 23:59).

Results

All 29 medical schools began postponement of teaching between the 11th and 17th of March 2020. Changes to assessments were highly variable. Final year examinations had largely been completed before the onset of COVID-19. Of 226 exam sittings between Year 1 and Year 4 across 29 schools: 93 (41%) were cancelled completely; 14 (6%) had elements cancelled; 57 (25%) moved their exam sitting online. 23 exam sittings (10%) were postponed to a future date. 36% of cohorts with cancelled exams and 74% of cohorts with online exams were granted automatic progression to the next academic year. There exist 19 cohorts at 9 medical schools where all examinations (written and practical) were initially cancelled and automatic progression was granted.

Conclusions

The approaches taken by medical schools have differed substantially, though there has been universal disruption to teaching and assessments. The data presented in this study represent initial responses, which are likely to evolve over time. In particular, the status of future elective cancellations and UK Foundation Programme Office (UKFPO) educational performance measure (EPM) decile calculations remains unclear. The long-term implications of the heterogeneous disruption to medical education remains an area of active research. Differences in specialty recruitment and performance on future postgraduate examinations may be affected and will be a focus of future phases of the ADAPT Study.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.29.20163907: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: The research presented in this manuscript, which is the initial phase of the ADAPT Study, was determined to be exempt from ethical review by the University College London (UCL) Research Ethics Committee (30/03/20).
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    The contributors to the ADAPT consortium are listed in Appendix A.
    ADAPT
    suggested: (ADAPT, RRID:SCR_006769)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.07.29.20163907v1 on medRxiv