Improving oral examinations: selecting, training, and monitoring examiners for the MRCGP. Royal College of General Practitioners

Unless examiners are carefully selected, trained, and monitored, examinations may become haphazard. This is perhaps most true of oral or viva voce ("viva") examinations, which can generate marks unrelated to competence. To help other bodies to short circuit some years of experiment in connection with the oral component of the Royal College of General Practitioners' membership examination (MRCGP), this paper describes the selection, training, guidance, and monitoring arrangements that have been developed.