Qualifying online assessment during COVID-19 pandemic: Reflecting on our experience under the cognitive lens of Miller’s pyramid

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has disrupted educational paradigms. Medical academic institutions have embraced a massive shift in terms of teaching online sessions, and have adopted and adapted telecommunication platforms. Medical schools have used both synchronous and asynchronous modalities of teaching. However, questions remain around the transfer of knowledge on the students’ part: in remote settings, student understanding cannot be monitored easily as before. This problem is complicated by online assessments, both formative and summative.1 During online discourse, ‘assessment’ has faced multiple challenges: (a) many teachers are not comfortable utilizing the current technologies, which calls for a fast-tracked faculty development program regarding online assessment; (b) the rigour, validity and reliability of online assessments are often viewed with scepticism owing in part to a lack of a setting standards; and (c) students’ academic integrity while attending online examinations is highly variable and this can compromise the fairness and authenticity of assessment.2 In other words, the assessment bar should neither be lowered too much, entitling all students to attain a passing grade, nor so complex as to confuse and demotivate the students. Either of these threatens the evolving dream of competency-based medical education with online or remote components. To help address these complications, some universities have switched to competency-based assignments instead of summative assessments.3,4 However, keeping in mind the majority of institutes all over the world are using objectively structured practical/clinical examination (OSPE/OSCE) as the prime modality of online assessment, we will examine ways of using the principles of Miller’s pyramid when applied to online assessment.