eOSCE stations live versus remote evaluation and scores variability

BACKGROUND: Objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) are known to be a fair evaluation method. These recent years, the use of online OSCEs (eOSCEs) has spread. This study aimed to compare remote versus live evaluation and assess the factors associated with score variability during eOSCEs. METHODS: We conducted large-scale eOSCEs at the medical school of the Université de Paris Cité in June 2021 and recorded all the students’ performances, allowing a second evaluation. To assess the agreement in our context of multiple raters and students, we fitted a linear mixed model with student and rater as random effects and the score as an explained variable. RESULTS: One hundred seventy observations were analyzed for the first station after quality control. We retained 192 and 110 observations for the statistical analysis of the two other stations. The median score and interquartile range were 60 out of 100 (IQR 50–70), 60 out of 100 (IQR 54–70), and 53 out of 100 (IQR 45–62) for the three stations. The score variance proportions explained by the rater (ICC rater) were 23.0, 16.8, and 32.8%, respectively. Of the 31 raters, 18 (58%) were male. Scores did not differ significantly according to the gender of the rater (p = 0.96, 0.10, and 0.26, respectively). The two evaluations showed no systematic difference in scores (p = 0.92, 0.053, and 0.38, respectively). CONCLUSION: Our study suggests that remote evaluation is as reliable as live evaluation for eOSCEs. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-022-03919-1.