# Twelve tips for final year medical students undertaking clinical assessment

## TL;DR

This paper provides 12 tips for senior medical students to improve clinical assessments by demonstrating work readiness traits like reliability and safety.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a framework for students to prepare for assessments that evaluate both academic and workplace readiness.

## Key findings

- Clinical assessments consider both academic outcomes and workplace readiness traits.
- Assessors judge students on reliability, trustworthiness, and safety when performance is borderline.
- The tips aim to help students demonstrate qualities needed for successful clinical team integration.

## Abstract

Clinical assessors in pre-registration examinations have been shown to make decisions about student performance by drawing on two overlapping, yet slightly different perspectives: achieving academic learning outcomes, and contributing to clinical workplace function. The implication for senior medical students is that they should be aware that in ‘final’ clinical assessments they may be judged from both academic and workplace perspectives, where the emphasis may be on how well the candidate would fit into a clinical team, demonstrating reliability, trustworthiness, teachability and ‘safety’.

This article presents 12 tips for how senior medical students may demonstrate progress towards achieving ‘work readiness’, and so improve performance in assessments close to graduation.

Clinical assessors may include judgment of how well the candidate might work as a junior member of a clinical team, particularly when candidates perform at the borderline level and where assessors are more experienced. This judgment is based on an impression of the student’s demonstration of reliability, trustworthiness, patient safety and teachability. While the underpinning theory was explored in final OSCEs, the suggestions may also be relevant to workplace-based clinical learning and assessment.

Senior medical students should prepare for clinical assessments that will consider more than essential knowledge and skills.