Internal Medicine Core Clerkship

An illustrative, fictional program — not based on any specific institution's curriculum. This is the input a client brings to EvalSmart, and the program behind the consensus example.

What makes a program description "evaluation-ready." You don't need standards, metrics, or a methodology — that's EvalSmart's job. You need to describe your program clearly. A strong description, like the one below, covers:

What the program is and where it runs (its setting)
Who it serves
What it actually does — the activities or services
What it's trying to achieve — the intended outcomes
How it's currently assessed — the data and instruments you already have
Why you're evaluating it, who the audience is, and the specific questions or concerns driving this cycle

Overview

The Internal Medicine Core Clerkship is a required eight-week rotation for third-year medical students in our undergraduate medical education (UME) program. It is a competency-based clerkship: the experience is organized around developing and demonstrating clinical competence, not simply logging time. Students rotate across several teaching sites, including our main academic hospital and a number of community hospitals and ambulatory clinics in the surrounding region.

Who it's for

The clerkship serves third-year medical students completing their core clinical year. A typical cohort moves through the rotation in blocks across the academic year.

What students do

Day to day, students participate in daily inpatient ward rounds with the medicine teams and attend ambulatory clinic sessions at their assigned sites. They give structured oral case presentations, attend a weekly clinical-reasoning conference built around real and simulated cases, and complete simulation-based skills sessions. Each student is required to submit written patient encounter write-ups over the course of the rotation. Roughly at the midpoint, each student has a formative mid-clerkship feedback meeting with clerkship faculty to discuss progress. The rotation ends with a summative assessment period.

What the clerkship is trying to develop

The clerkship's stated aims are for students to develop four areas of competence: clinical reasoning, patient care, medical knowledge, and communication. These are the competencies the faculty describe when they talk about what a successful clerkship student looks like.

How students are assessed

Several sources of assessment information are collected during the clerkship:

The NBME Medicine subject (shelf) examination, taken at the end of the rotation.
End-of-rotation clinical evaluations completed by supervising faculty and residents, who also serve as the students' teachers.
An OSCE using standardized patients.
Direct-observation assessments of students during real clinical encounters.
Patient logs that students maintain in the learning management system (LMS).

Supervision is provided by attending physicians and residents at each site, who both teach and rate the students.

Why we want to evaluate the clerkship

Each year the clerkship goes through a continuous quality improvement (CQI) review, and the results feed our UME curriculum committee. As an accredited UME program we are accountable for the quality and consistency of this required clerkship. The clerkship director and the curriculum committee are the primary audiences for this evaluation, and they use it to make annual CQI decisions and to refine the assessment system.

Leadership's specific concerns this cycle:

Are students actually achieving the intended competencies by the end of the clerkship?
Is assessment consistent across our community sites? We have noticed variability in the clinical-evaluation scores coming from different sites, and we are not sure whether that reflects real differences in students or differences in how sites and raters evaluate.
Is the student experience equitable across sites — are students at different sites getting comparable clinical exposure and comparable outcomes?
Where can we strengthen the assessment system overall?

We are bringing this to an evaluator to help us turn these concerns into a sound, defensible evaluation plan for the clerkship.

See what EvalSmart produces from this description: an illustrative consensus example (the reliability view over repeated runs)

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