In my fifth year of med school at Imperial College London, there was a brilliant exam that I believe fundamentally set apart our medical knowledge from other medical schools. It was the pathology module and it encompassed Chemical Pathology, Haematology, Microbiology and Immunology.

The focus wasn't on the treatment but rather an understanding of the underlying reason why disease causes pathology. It's nearly totally aligned with MRCP Part 1 and may be part of the reason why Imperial graduates typically score better than others at the MRCP exams.

When I was sitting the pathology exam in 2019 I developed a website based on difficult questions and lectures in order to best test the learning of these topics. I used a novel answer format that Imperial was trialling called Very Short Answers (VSAs) - which I still feel is a superior examination technique.

The reason VSAs were never tried before is that they're difficult to mark and sensitive to small errors, spelling mistakes and words that mean the same but are different. Computers can only match exact matches by default.

My initial interpretation of this problem relied on algorithmic word analysis techniques to allow spelling mistakes with a bank of acceptable answers that was manually generated.

Nowadays though if an answer is not recognised then LLMs can mark it.

I have found that this combination allows for a very powerful, effective learning technique for my medical school pathology exams. The website in question is MedGEMS - http://medgems.net and is open to all, although is optimised for the Imperial/Oxford/Cambridge pathology medical student exams.

Always open to suggestions