Effect of Covid-19 on Medical Education and Examination: A Cross-Sectional Survey across Medical Colleges of Pakistan

Background: COVID-19 outbreak was first reported in the Wuhan city in 2019, causing the whole world to undergo a period of lockdown to curtail the disease. This affected education and examination of medical students across the world including Pakistan. Objective: To know the impact of COVID-19 on the medical education and future of medical examination, from medical students’ perspective.

Methods: An online qualitative survey was conducted among the medical students of different medical colleges of Pakistan from 20th October 2021 to 15th November 2021. Google forms were used to collect data. Informed consent was obtained at the start of the survey. SPSS version 22 was used for data analysis.

Results: Our study had a response rate of 99.7% with 4548 respondents, ranging from the first year to final year MBBS. The highest number of respondents were from 1st-year MBBS and accounted for 25.4% (n=1153 responses). 93% (n=4254) of the respondents agreed that lockdown had impacted their education, 85.1% (n=3870) were having online classes and only 9.6% (n=436) were satisfied with online education. 65% (n=2998) considered online education to be an ineffective teaching method. Only 25% of the respondents (n=1137) wanted to be examined online whereas 34.5% (n=1571) were of the view that online viva was an ineffective method of examination. 41% (n=1897) of the respondents considered that students should be promoted without examination during the COVID-19 pandemic and 41.5% (n=1886) thought that students who had passed the written exam should be promoted without viva. 46% (n=2117) favored the rational method of exam.

Conclusions: Our data showed that the majority of students having online classes were not satisfied with this mode of education due to financial constraints, connectivity issues and quality of lectures and these problems need to be resolved.