Development and Validation of a Shared Secure Biochemistry Test Bank for Medical, Dental, and Pharmacy Schools

Abstract

A shared secure biochemistry test bank (abeQbank) was developed by 61 members of the Association of Biochemistry Educators (ABE) who are from medical, pharmacy, and dental schools. The initial abeQbank contained 305 questions, which were almost all clinical vignettes, and were classified into 9 biochemistry megaThemes with subthemes as determined by ABE workshops 2009–2011. Three medical schools selected 163 board-style abeQbank questions approved by ABE and administered a proctored formative exam using ExamSoft to 97 second-year medical students prior to their USMLE or COMLEX 1 board exam followed by a review session in which students examined their answers and read the rationale for each question. The goals of this project were to (1) provide a resource to biochemistry educators; (2) evaluate the quality of these questions; and (3) ascertain students’ relative knowledge in different biochemical concepts. Individual questions and 9 megaTheme groups performed similarly across schools, with the lowest and highest megaThemes ranging from 40 to 70% correct. Five questions were dropped due to miscoding, poor metrics, or questionable distractors requiring a rewrite. The results showed that the examination was strongly reliable with the average KR20 = 0.85, discrimination index and point-biserial > 0.2, and students scoring the examination 8 out of 10 in usefulness. This test bank represents the first attempt by an international biochemistry organization to create a standardized set of questions, with future expansion planned to help standardize the content of biochemistry topics in the curricula.