Assessment of the relative educational efficiency of the academic staff in the field of health care

Abstract

Annual assessment of academic staff and regular publication of the results of such evaluations on the official websites of higher education institutions, on information boards and in any other way is a regulatory requirement laid down in subparagraph 3 of paragraph 2 of Article 16 of the Law of Ukraine «On Higher Education». Existing methods of academic staff assessment found in literature do not allow to make judgments about the quality of educational work, or are based on student surveys and therefore incorporate a number of errors introduced by the subjective nature of assessment. The purpose of this work is to develop an objective way to assess the educational work of academic staff in the field of health care. We propose a system for such assessment, which consists of a subsystem of external independent assessment of students’ knowledge, for example in the format of unified state qualifying exams (USQE: «Step-1», «Step-2», «Step-B» etc.), and a subsystem of internal administrative analysis. The internal administrative analysis subsystem combines the results of students who were taught by a particular teacher in a particular discipline, in the relevant USQE subtest using a special formula and adjusts them to the potential of each student, the complexity of the subtest and the total complexity of USQE in that academic year. The proposed system is implemented in the medical faculty of Uzhhorod National University, and the result of the academic staff assessment was discussed at the academic council of the faculty and at the meetings of departments. The application of the developed system provides an objective assessment of the educational work in the field of health care, and the results of its application are a motivating factor in educational activities and can be taken into account during the renegotiation of contracts for academic staff in higher education.