gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Peer tutoring system is based on students – tutors teaching fellow younger students and has been proven to be effective numerous times. However, when it comes to tutors evaluating students it is not clear what qualities the student tutor should have as an evaluator to positively influence on the evaluee. Should he keep the standard student-to-student relationship should he present himself more strictly? In this research we evaluated which students performed better on OSCEs – those who perceived their evaluator as stricter or those who did not.

Methods: We included 99 students of year 3 from Faculty of Medicine Maribor in academic year 2024/2025. They first completed one month of practical sessions, focused on history taking and clinical examinations. We then evaluated them by OSCEs. In the research we focused on history taking and clinical examination of the abdomen. After each OSCE students received a questionnaire where they rated the strictness of their tutor evaluator and they answered a separate question on students’ general opinion on the influence of the strictness. We then compared the reported strictness and the number of points that they had received on OSCEs. Statistical analysis was performed in JASP.

Results: OSCE results among students who reported higher perception of strictness of their tutor evaluator and those who reported lower level did not differ (p=0.202). Only 30% of the students reported that they believe the higher level of strictness of the tutor evaluator would make them perform better on OSCEs.

Conclusions: We found no difference in OSCE results when students perceived their tutor-evaluator stricter. Most students also reported that they believed that a higher level of strictness wouldn’t influence them to perform better on the OSCEs. Even in evaluating, it is best to preserve the main advantage of the tutoring system – the student-to-student relationship.