Practice placement education is an essential component of health professional programmes. The number of students with a disability entering health professional education programmes is anticipated to rise, yet research about the perspectives of students with a disability is limited, especially related to practice placement education. Therefore, the need to investigate student experiences has intensified. In this study, qualitative research methodology was used to investigate the perceptions, feelings and experiences of health professional students with a disability during practice placement education. Five health professional students, recruited from a regional university in New South Wales, Australia, participated in semi-structured, individual interviews. A phenomenological approach was used. Following inductive analysis of the data, three themes reflecting the students' experience of practice placement education emerged: the impact of disability, including the barriers and the strategies used to overcome these; the experiences of practice placement education, including the feelings of the participants; and support, which came from the practice placement educator, the university staff, family and friends. This pilot study provides valuable insight into the perspectives of these students about practice placement education. The findings reinforce the need for further exploration of the unique experiences of students with a disability to ensure success within their university programme and future profession.

An investigation is reported in which twenty-four students in electronics and physics sat two different three-hour examinations covering the same syllabus on consecutive days under conventional examination conditions. These papers were later re-marked and the results suggest that inter-paper variation is much larger than inter-marker variation.

Over 750 scripts were analysed to see how the order in which students answered questions could affect their mark. It is suggested that the wrong choice of questions is made on up to about 35% of occasions and that subsequent mark deficiency could be as high as 4.2 marks.

No abstract

No abstract