There are two well-known phrases in the health professions education area that states both meaning and value of student assessment: “assessment drives learning” and “evaluation is the tail that wags the dog”. Despite this importance, undergraduate courses on health sciences continue to assess future professionals who will be delivered to society and job market only partially and poorly. Assessment of students and health professionals is a fundamental element of the curriculum of undergraduate, specialization and training programs, such as the medical residency and the multi-professional one. Assessing students and trainees includes actions to check the acquisition of knowledge, skills and attitudes. Yet, when assessment is well used, it may promote learning and the development of competences. Thus, a proper assessment may qualify health care and therefore is closely related to patient safety.

From this perspective, it is expected that educational programs clearly define its learning goals, skills and competences to be achieved by students and trainees. Likewise, educational programs must be able to provide sufficient learning opportunities of high quality to the desired results to be achieved; also, institutions and programs should have the technical capacity to design and implement robust and defensible assessment systems.

In[u1]  Brazil, there is still a significant gap in knowledge and practical experiences on programmatic assessment and on the implementation of assessment systems, which comprise both advanced concepts that are already present in health programs and courses from the best universities in the world.

The Assessment ConferenceRP will be an opportunity for students (from undergraduate and graduate courses), faculty members, teachers, tutors and academic managers to discuss highlighted topics on assessment, and also interact with national and international experts, to share ideas and experiences that will contribute to the qualification of assessment practices in the health professions education area.

The Conference will also offer a set of workshops on relevant topics in the context of student assessment: good practices regarding developing multiple-choice tests and short essays; the objective structured clinical examination (the OSCE model and its variations); workplace-based assessment and feedback; assessment of professionalism (challenges and possibilities).

The Conference will also comprise an opportunity to show work in progress in Brazilian schools. We invite all interested parties to submit abstracts of original work and descriptions of experiences related to student or trainee assessment for poster presentation. The best papers presented will be awarded and all the accepted abstracts will be published in a supplementary issue of the local, open-access journal of the Ribeirão Preto Medical School at University of São Paulo (FMRP-USP).