Medical School Assessments
CATEGORY
Information Design
CLIENT
Faculty of Medicine
(University of Alberta)
YEAR
2022
In medical school, learners are frequently assessed through written exams. Although challenging, these major assessments are critical to medical student's education as it ensures the level of competency needed to become a physician. For this reason, the Faculty of Medicine (UofA) has a formal process to help students that fail one or several major assessments throughout the year. To keep students on track, the faculty offers rewrites, has a review committee, makes recommendations, and allows an appeal process. In the past, these processes were only communicated through text-heavy policy documents, leaving learners confused about the process.
For this project, I worked with the Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs to help learners better understand what happens if they fail a major assessment in medical school. The primary aim was to demystify this complicated process and to clarify the faculty's intentions behind their assessment failure process.
Deliverables
The final deliverable for this project is an infographic and slides. This approach uses visual metaphors, select text, and illustration to break down the steps of the student failure process. This infographic can be distributed digitally or printed, and has been expanded to include slides for student orientation.
Deliverables: 8.5" x 11" sheet and slides for student orientation.
Ideation and Exploration
To gain a complete understanding of the process, myself and a colleague read all policy documents and spoke in depth with the Assistant Dean, Academic Affairs. From this point, I narrowed down the key points the learners and staff needed to understand, and I began to ideate how to best visually represent this process.
Through a series of sketching and storyboarding I discovered that a narrative or sequential approach would work best to represent the time and stages that happen once a student fails a major assessment in medical school. Ideas were narrowed down to two possible visualizations, and eventually, I decided to pursue a road-map visual.
Story boarding and ideation.
Rationale
I chose to illustrate a road map because it aligned with the faculty's ideology for the student failure process. For example, all learners will be on their own academic journey, will run into obstacles and road blocks, and may need to take a detour. With the help of the formal student failure process, the learners will get "back on track" and advance with their peers. Once the learners reach the end of the year, the review committee may ask them to repeat the year if they have failed more than 2 major assessments. This is highlighted as the cars reach the end of the road and have three options: repeating the journey, parking and appealing their recommendation, or continuing onwards.
At the highest level, this infographic draws parallels to road safety and the formal failure process; driving has rules and safety measures to keep everyone on the road safe, just like the Faculty has rules and a formal process to ensure that the medical students graduate with full competency.
Revisions
The Details
Consultation credit goes to my colleague Patrick von Hauff.