Medical Students' Perspective about Influencing Factors of Anxiety during Objective Structured Clinical Examination: A Descriptive Study

Aims: Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is a versatile multipurpose evaluative tool that can be used to evaluate health care professionals or soon to be in a clinical setting. Students’ performance in facing an exam consisted of their skills, knowledge, their condition, and their level of anxiety. Anxiety is defined by the American Psychological Association (APA) as an emotion marked by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes such as increasing blood pressure, sweating, trembling, dizziness, or tachycardia.

Study Design: An analytic observational study with a cross-sectional research design.

Place and Duration of Study: Faculty of Medicine, Hasanuddin University, Makassar, Indonesia. This study was held from October until December 2021.

Methodology: We gained 167 samples, which is determined by the Lemeshow formula, from the 2nd and 3rd-year students of Hasanuddin University Faculty of Medicine used a simple random side technique and they are given APA modified questionnaire regarding anxiety and student perceptions, implementation of the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) during the pandemic.

Results: There are 167 people that fulfilled the criteria from the second-and the third-year preclinical students. The importance of the OSCE exam, the majority of students answered very importantly as many as 121 people (72.46%). For the students' self-confidence/motivation statement items the majority of students answered very prepared as many as 77 people (46.11%). For the physicondition-related anxiety statement items, on the first point the disturbing thoughts during the exam the majority of students answered strongly agree as many as 70 people (41.92%). For the statement items of the exam process, in the first point, namely the concern for examiners, the majority of students answered strongly agree as many as 69 people (41.32%). We concluded that the majority of students feel that OSCE is very important, but they didn’t feel confident regarding their own performance.

Conclusion: The student’s anxiety is correlated with their preparation and self-confidence in facing OSCE during the pandemic.