The Medical Schools Council Assessment Alliance (MSC-AA) is a partnership to improve undergraduate assessment practice through collaboration between all 31 undergraduate medical schools in the UK. The MSC-AA is an expansion of UMAP, which began in January 2003 supported by HEFCE’s Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning. The MSC-AA launched in August 2010 following a suggestion from the General Medical Council that medical schools might share assessment items as an alternative to a national licensing exam.

The MSC-AA will enable more individuals to be involved in item-writing and quality assurance, resulting in improved individual and institutional skills and knowledge regarding the development of high quality assessments in medicine. Partner schools will be given access to a question bank of high-quality items with good validity and reliability in a variety of formats. The questions have been developed in collaboration and undergone extensive quality assurance and standard setting.

All UK medical schools have agreed to include a proportion of finals examination questions from the shared question bank, which enable psychometrically valid comparisons.

Future work
In addition to collaboration for medical school final examination assessments, the Medical Schools Council is also involved in two other assessment initiatives; the development of a Situational Judgement Test (SJT) for selection to the Foundation Programme as part of the Improving Selection to the Foundation Programme project, and the development of a Prescribing Skills Assessment (PSA) for final year undergraduate medical students in conjunction with the British Pharmacological Society. It is envisaged that once the SJT and PSA have been developed the items will also be held in the MSC-AA question bank and the MSC-AA processes for item writing and quality assurance will be applied.