Assessment in Human Anatomy and Students Performance- A Case Study of University of The Gambia, West Africa

The decision to predict students' performance in a course creates an opportunity to improve educational outcome. This present study was aimed to derive an equation (if any) for predicting the professional examination performance in Anatomy of students' from their continuous assessment scores. One hundred and thirty five students (135) were registered for medical programme in the 2016/2017, 2017/2018 and 2018/2019 sessions in the University of The Gambia, out of which only one hundred and thirty two (132) students who sat for the professional examination participated in this study, the remaining three could not continue the programme. Students' scores were obtained from record sheets for continuous assessment and professional examinations and were analyzed by SPSS version 20.0 for the mean, standard deviation and range for both continuous assessment and professional examinations. The three sessional results pooled together showed that 18.2% of students obtained distinction (score > 70%), 75.7% obtained pass (score = 50-69%), and 6.1% obtained fail (score <50%). The professional examination significantly correlated with the continuous assessment (r = 0.766, p< 0.05). Based on the pooled data, an equation was deduced for predicting students' performance in Human Anatomy professional examination from their continuous assessment, y=14.47+2.35x where x is overall continuous assessment score. This equation will help to predict students' performance in professional examination if they have only continuous assessment result and it can also identify weak students that may need extra effort to pass professional examination.

Key Words: Professional examination, Continuous assessment, Human Anatomy, Gambia, MBChB