Critical stop points

The critical stop point (CSP) is a specialist feature available only for OSCE items. It essentially adds a checkbox field to the mark sheet which, if selected by the examiner, automatically fails the candidate. It does so by passing this data into the standard setting process where it automatically applies either a station or an exam fail mark as appropriate.

It is possible to configure your site so that critical stop points result in a failure of the individual station or of the entire exam (however this is a global setting and will apply site-wide). If you would like to discuss or change this option on your site, please contact us via the service desk.

The most common application of this feature is as a "significant concerns" flag or similar. Where an additional field is presented on the mark sheet for examiners to indicate if they have observed dangerous or unprofessional actions/behaviours that sit outside of the proscribed marking criteria. 

Setting up a critical stop point

The setup of the critical stop point is carried out during the construction of mark sheet criteria, either at the local or the global level.

To mark a criterion a critical stop point, tick the box on the mark sheet criterion.

There are two important points to be aware of:

• The CSP checkbox is only available for boolean (checkbox) criteria. It is not possible to make a discrete criterion into a critical stop point. Where a potential stop point is related to an individual checklist item a separate field should be created. 
• A CSP field cannot be made mandatory. If it were to be mandatory, the examiner would have to provide a response (i.e. tick the box) before they could submit the mark sheet. That would mean all candidates fail.

The mark sheet view

The below shows how the critical stop point field is presented to examiners in both the assess for browser and assess for iPad applications:

• The browser view shows a separate tick and cross response option.

  

• The iPad application shows a single tick box