ABSTRACT:
The purpose of computer based objective clinical examination (COCE) is regular, fair and unprejudiced assessment of student’s periodontal clinical skills. Since in this method the clinical skills of students should be evaluated, the design is based on clinical principle questions. The slides for the COCE are presented on the screen regularly and systematically according to preset time. While performing the test, the examiners do not have any role, the patient’s slides automatically presented by the PowerPoint software, required information displayed on the screen and students must respond to relevant questions. The traditional clinical examinations are unreliable for its bias, unfair questions and lack of a strong correlation amongst different examiners. With a greater emphasis on problem based teaching and testing in periodontology, the COCE, due to its reliability and validity, has become the gold standard for the evaluation of clinical skills of undergraduate students of dentistry at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences.