Development and Implementation of an Objective Structured Clinical Examination for Evaluating Clinical Psychology Graduate Students

Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have been utilized for decades to systematically assess the clinical skills of students in medical schools and nursing programs. To date, few health service psychology programs have integrated this potentially useful training tool into their assessments and instead typically rely on clinical supervisors to rate clinical skills in unstructured and uncontrolled training environments. To address this gap in clinical evaluation, the authors designed and implemented a Clinical Psychology-OSCE (CP-OSCE) for 3rd-year clinical psychology doctoral students. The CP-OSCE was feasible to administer and enabled the identification of strengths and weaknesses among students. Further, the CP-OSCE highlighted the need for additional diversity and risk assessment training within our program. Administration of the OSCE is, in the authors’ view, a valuable method for assessing whether students possess the foundational skills needed to advance to a clinical internship, and the requisite skill set for successful completion of the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology-Part 2.