Introduction:

Summative assessment is usually applied at the end of an academic period to measure a student’s learning outcome, these assessments use various representations of patients, from real patients to written narratives based on clinical cases. There is scarse evidence about association between the results of written assessments based on clinical cases and academic performance in medical students.

Objective:

To evaluate the correlation between the score of an annual written exam based on clinical cases with multiple choice questions and the weighted average -as an indicator of academic performance- in students of human medicine in Peru.

Method:

Secondary data análisis with longitudinal panel design for the period 2017 to 2020. The annual exam has 250 multiple-choice questions based on a clinical context drawn from published case reports. Each correctly answered question provided one point, the score was transformed to a vigesimal scale and its correlation with the weighted average was evaluated. Scatter plots and the calculation of the spearman correlation coefficient were performed. The analysis was performed for each academic year.

Results:

Data from 228 students were analyzed, the means of annual exam scores varies between 9.61 (standard deviation = 1.91) for 2019 to 10.75 (standard deviation = 2.34) for 2018. In all years, a significant direct linear correlation was found between the annual weighted average and the annual exam score. The highest correlation occurred in 2019 (Spearman’s rho [rS = 0.812]). In the correlation analysis according to sex, significant correlations were obtain.

Conclusions:

In each of the years analyzed, the score obtained in the annual exam is directly linearly correlated with the academic performance, a direct linear correlation was also found between the annual exam scores.