Idaho State Physician Assistant Program
About
The Idaho State University PA Program has been training physician’s assistants since 1995. Their program, with its heavy emphasis on being student and service focused, strives to “train PAs through service-oriented, multimodal, innovative learning. Graduates from ISU’s PA Program will be highly competent, compassionate health care providers dedicated to serving individuals and their communities.” Located in Pocatello, Idaho, the program trains 72 new PAs each year with additional locations at partner campuses.
The Challenge
The physician’s assistant program at ISU was interested in a way to administer assessments and tie questions back to the standards being tested. Such technology would help them understand how their students were performing on specific standards and adjust accordingly without putting in hours of work to do it by hand.
The Solution: Implementing examN
The ISU PA program decided to implement examN to help with their identified challenge. examN offers secure online and offline testing with a variety of question types and ways of automatically proctoring exams. The powerful analytics of examN were especially helpful; the software offers numerous reports tracking student performance on various indicators and competencies. It also provides test item analysis, helping instructors to determine which test items are effective and which should be revised or removed.
They also implemented eCurriculum, our curriculum mapping service, along with examN. This allowed for automatic integration between the two modules, making it even easier to map test items and student performance on them to standards at any level of the curriculum.
Customizing the Solution
The ISU PA program continues to find examN to be a hugely useful addition to their program. As they have continued to use it, AllofE has been able to work with the program to design some custom features to optimize their system for their needs. One of these customizations was that the team built a new tab in the system so that students could also view their performance on tests in one centralized location. They also created a custom print option so instructors can more easily print (or save) versions of the test with the correct answers indicated.
Results
AllofE and the ISU PA program have enjoyed their partnership since 2014. The eMedley team is happy to be continuing to help the Physician’s Assistant program as they educate well-trained, compassionate PAs.