Abstract

Objectives: To compare the academic performance of undergraduate medical students with and without preparatory leaves in the examinations of forensic medicine.Material and Methods: The study was conducted at Rehman Medical College, Peshawar from June 2015 to September 2015, and comprised of 96 students of 3rd year MBBS. In this study academic performance of the students was comparedby using SPSS in three examinations of forensic medicine on the basis of preparatory leaves. In end of module exam (EOME) there was no preparatory leaves; midterm exam has three while end of session exam (EOSE) consisted of one week preparatory leaves. Total six EOME were conducted during the session. The average of all six EOME was considered for comparison with midterm and EOSE. First the overall academic performance of the students was compared in three different examinations and then the students were divided into four different categories for further analysis. The categories were as follows; students who got (i) < 50% marks (ii) 50-69% marks (iii) 70-79% marks (iv) ? 80% marks. All the exams consisted of theory and practical examination while the theory paper was further divided into two components: part-I: Multiple choice questions (MCQs); single best answer type and part-2; short essay questions (SEQs). Structured key was provided to the examiners in order to eliminate the bias when the papers were evaluated.Results: The results of the present study showed significant difference of p-value 0.001 when the students’ academic performance was compared in end of module, mid-term and end of session examinations. When further pairwise comparison was made between EOME and midterm; no significant difference was found while a significant difference of P-value 0.001 was found when EOME was compared with EOSE. Similarly when midterm exam was compared with EOSE; a significant difference of p-value 0.01 was found.When the academic performance of the students was compared on the basis of marks categories, the results revealed improvement in the categories of <50% and 50-69% while the category of those students who got ? 70% marks was least affected by the preparatory leaves.Conclusion: Overall students’ performance was improved academically when they were given preparatory leaves. However, the academic performance of the competent students (who got ?70% marks in EOME) was good throughout and was least affected by the preparatory leaves.