Assessment is a key method of improving standards as well as establishing competency. However, despite major developments in the assessment of clinical competence in the last two decades, there is still more bad practice and ignorance of significant issues in this area than any other aspect of medical higher education.

This book comprehensively covers all aspects of assessment. It considers current and future policy and practice, including the Modernising Medical Careers training programme; it promotes a system incorporating more meaningful assessments, rather than just ‘tests’ of knowledge and skill.

Assessment in Medical Education and Training will be useful to everyone involved in healthcare education, including tutors, trainers, clinical supervisors and assessors in both primary and secondary care. It will also be important reading for consultants and general practitioners with responsibility for registrars, and healthcare education policy makers and shapers.

‘This thoughtful, provocative and eclectic book is published at a time of enormous change in the content, structure and quality assurance of postgraduate medical education in the United Kingdom. The reader will be challenged and stimulated by the variety of views and emphases. Essential.’
Dame Lesley Southgate, in the Foreword

* Introduction
* The principles of assessment design
* Assessment in the undergraduate curriculum
* Assessment in the Foundation Programme
* Record of in-training assessments (RITA)
* Assessment for recruitment
* Workplace-based assessment for general practice training
* Preparing teachers for work-based teaching and assessing
* Simulated surgery for the assessment of consulting skills
* Video assessment bullet Summative assessment
* Self assessment - tools for personal development
* Practice based assessment
* Assessment where performance gives rise to concern
* Legal perspectives of assessment
* Postmodernising medical careers: assessment in an age of uncertainty