Making medical student course evaluations meaningful: implementation of an intensive course review protocol

BACKGROUND: Ongoing course evaluation is a key component of quality improvement in higher education. The complexities associated with delivering high quality medical education programs involving multiple lecturers can make course and instructor evaluation challenging. We describe the implementation and evaluation of an “intensive course review protocol” in an undergraduate medical program METHODS: We examined pre-clerkship courses from 2006 to 2011 - prior to and following protocol implementation. Our non-parametric analysis included Mann-Whitney U tests to compare the 2006/07 and 2010/11 academic years. RESULTS: We included 30 courses in our analysis. In the 2006/07 academic year, 13/30 courses (43.3 %) did not meet the minimum benchmark and were put under intensive review. By 2010/11, only 3/30 courses (10.0 %) were still below the minimum benchmark. Compared to 2006/07, courses ratings in the 2010/11 year were significantly higher (p = 0.004). However, during the study period mean response rates fell from 76.5 % in 2006/07 to 49.7 % in 2010/11. CONCLUSION: These results suggest an intensive course review protocol can have a significant impact on pre-clerkship course ratings in an undergraduate medical program. Reductions in survey response rates represent an ongoing challenge in the interpretation of student feedback. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12909-015-0387-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.