Universities medical assessment partnership

The Universities Medical Assessment Partnership (UMAP) was set up in 2003 with the aim to develop a high quality bank of written assessment items for use in high stakes examinations at UK medical schools.

UMAP aims
The partnership's aims are: • To become a national opt-in system for assessments in undergraduate medicine.

• To develop a bank of sufficient size such that security is a non-issue.

• To sustain and build on quality in question writing and question review.

• To output evidence based research on assessments in undergraduate medicine.

In an article published by the Subject Centre for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine it is written that by sharing resources and working together the UMAP partners are attempting to stop "reinventing the wheel" in the field of undergraduate written assessment in medical education.

UMAP partners
The project began as a partnership of medical schools at University of Leeds, University of Liverpool, University of Manchester, University of Newcastle and University of Sheffield. The project has since grown to 14 partners including University of Birmingham, University of East Anglia, Hull York Medical School, University of Keele, University of Leicester, Peninsula Medical School, University of Southampton, University of St Andrews and University of Warwick.*

Funding
The project was originally funded through the HEFCE Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning, Phase 4. Funding was awarded for a three year set up term which ran from January 2003 to December 2005. At the end of the funded period the original five partners agreed that UMAP would move to become self-funded. At this time the consortium invited other UK medical schools to join.

Process
UMAP is a collaborative project where each member school contributes equal effort and resource to the development of a written assessment item bank dedicated to MCQs and extending matching questions (EMQs) items. Each partner hosts question writing training workshops, facilitated by the central project team. Invited item authors are members of either NHS or university staff. Items are brought forward into the item bank in draft form before being allocated for editing and approval by one of UMAP's many question quality assurance teams. Items are fed back into the bank with those being approved where they are ready for use in any notified high stakes examination taking place at a partner medical school. Partner schools select a range of items from the UMAP bank in advance of an examination and scrutinise these in order to achieve the correct mix of items for the intended examination. Anonymous examination results are later fed back to UMAP so that item analysis can be undertaken, removing any items from further use if necessary. Feedback is then returned to the original authors including the proportion of correct student answers per each item usage instance.

Progress
In a webpage advertising a UMAP workshop to members of staff at University of Leeds it is quoted that "'18 high stakes examinations took place across partner medical schools in 2005/06 using items from UMAP.'"

The UMAP bank is reported to have amassed over 4000 written assessment items since 2003.

UMAP makes regular annoucements about forthcoming item writing workshops which are open to members of staff with an affiliation to UK medical education and take place across the 14 partner school sites.

UMAP is referred to in a report published by the GMC Education Committee exploring strategic options to improve assessment provision in UK undergradute medical education. 

Related activities
UMAP is involved in a range of activities relevant to quality enhancement in undergraduate medical assessments. The same project team as runs the UMAP project received funding in 2005 from the Joint Information Systems Committee to research and define a software tool to support storage, exchange and analysis of high stakes assessment items. The funded project is titled UKCDR.