The relationship between age of candidates and performance in the FRACGP examination

The Fellowship Examination of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners assesses a candidate's performance in five behavioural domains - knowledge, interpretation, problem solving, affective behaviour and psychomotor skills. The behavioural domains al-e tested in a variety of examination segments. These behavioral domains were used as the basis for comparing the performance of various age groups in the examinations from 1989-1992. The candidates' results in their first attempt at each segment were analysed. There was a total of 946 candidates sitting the examination in this period. At the aggregated level, there was a general trend of declining performance with age, across each of the behavioural domains. The greatest fall in performance occurred after the age of 39 years. These trends suggest that either current assessment methods tend to disadvantage the older candidates or the behavioural domains of knowledge, interpretation, problem solving,affective behaviour and psychomotor skill tend to decay with age. The ramifications of each of these scenarios are discussed with regard to future directions for the FRA CGP examination.