Students' perception about assessment environment of University of Lahore - Dental School: A cross-sectional survey

Objective: To evaluate the perception of undergraduate dentistry medical students about the assessment environment at their institution. Methods: The cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted at the University of Lahore, Lahore, Pakistan, from April 2017 to September 2017, and comprised undergraduate dentistry medical students who were asked to complete the Assessment Environment Questionnaire. Students' individual perception scores were calculated and the means of both individual domain and global score were compared in terms of different academic years. SPSS 20 was used for statistical analysis. Results: Of the100 subjects, 50(50%) each were from 1st year and 2nd year. Overall, the students perceived their assessment environment positive yielding a global mean score of 49.84 +/- 10.84 out of the maximum 80. Second year students scored significantly higher compared to first year students in all domains except feedback mechanism (p=0.0017), learning and performance (p=0.0014), information on assessment (p=0.0064), and total mean score of 53.5 +/- 8.24 compared to 46.12 +/- 11.7 (p=0.0004). Conclusion: The students' perception of the assessment environment was more positive than negative.