Marking Features

Criteria Marking Types

Criteria in MyDispense come in four varieties, auto-marked, manually marked, cumulative and custom.

Auto-marked criteria are simple enough that the system can mark them. This covers simple equation criteria, such as checking the dispense date matches the exercise date and so on.

Manually marked criteria require human oversight and are too complex for the system to mark them accurately. Counselling and directions on a medication label are examples of free text entry fields that can’t be marked easily by a computer. Manually marked criteria are prefixed by ‘maximum mark for’ as part of their criteria name.

Cumulative marks are a special set of marks designed to simplify the marking process for some label criteria. Criteria such as the label script date, doctor and patient are not re-selected during the label creation process, so they have been moved to a single location. Cumulative marks are tallied using the number of medications in an exercise. If the mark is set at 3 and there are 3 medications in the exercise, then one correct label item is worth 1 mark, adding up each label the total mark awarded would be 3.

Custom marking is reserved for more complicated sections such as Fact Finding and Patient Questions. These have their own system for marking and will be explained in their respective sections.

Critical criteria

It’s possible to flag almost any marking criteria in MyDispense as “critical”. Critical flagging is used to highlight a learning objective failure in an assessment, if a student gets 0 or negative marks on a flagged criteria, they should probably fail the exercise/assessment.

Flagging a criteria as critical is only used as a guideline. The system does not force the student to fail an exercise, only alerts markers to a critical failure in the marking interface. It is always up to the marker to make the final decision about a student’s marks, not MyDispense.

Customise Exercise Criteria

Marking criteria can be disabled to focus on learning outcomes. This includes disabling label marking completely, allowing an assessment to be about counselling or fact finding. Disabling criteria (outside of fact finding and patient questions), is done on a per item and criteria basis. For example, you could disable marks for initials on one label and have it enabled on another.

Read next: Error Marking