The Objective Structured Practical Examination (OSPE) is feasible and acceptable to the students for the internal evaluation of practical skills (Malhotra et al., 2013).  However, some suggest that OSPE cannot judge high levels of taxonomy, for example in Anatomy (Asad, Iqbal, Asim and Farman, 2017). 
I could not do my OSPE yet, so I'm going to do my reflection on my Mock OSPE. 
Even with some experience of doing OSPE, I have developed a combination of physical and emotional symptoms such as headache, high heart rate, stress and fear.  I was having anxiety test-caused by my fear of failure and the lack of preparation in the equine mock OSPE. It has been well established that test anxiety leads to a systematic underestimation of the true cognitive skills of respondents (Haladyna and Downing, 2005), but it has been found that physiotherapy students performing an untimely test improve their execution which may be related to a reduction in anxiety of the test (Schwartz et al., 2014). 
I found out that my test anxiety has increased dramatically since the moment I tried to put the headcollar of the horse. I have tried both options, and none of these worked, at least for me. I began to stress and shake, ending feeling I wanted to escape and asking the examiner for help.  The control of this response is something I have to improve for my OSCE. I walked away from my equine evaluation feeling stress, helplessness and disappointment.  I felt a lot of pressure to pass my second assessment. I didn't pass my dog simulating OSPE, as I forgot to close the door before pulling the dog out of the kennel. Anxiety has also been found to affect visual memory (Tuller and Pinto, 2010). At that time, I knew that my negativity after my previous examination directly affects my performance in my second evaluation. 

The conclusion of my reflection is that I need to improve in many ways: control my anxiety, increase my confidence and improve my equine abilities. I have included this in my Personal Development Plan (PDP) to improve.

 

 

 

REFERENCES 

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Harden, R. and Cairncross, R., 1980. Assessment of practical skills: The objective structured practical examination (OSPE). Studies in Higher Education, 5(2), pp.187-196.

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Asad, M., Iqbal, K., Asim, A. and Farman, S., 2017. INTEGRATED PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT; STUDENT’S PERCEPTION AND ITS RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE AS COMPARED WITH TRADITIONAL OSPES. THE PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL JOURNAL, 24(07), pp.972-976.

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Malhotra, S., Shah, K. and Patel, V. (2013) Objective structured practical examination as a tool for the formative assessment of practical skills of undergraduate students in pharmacology. Journal of Education and Health Promotion. 2(1), pp.53

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Haladyna, T. and Downing, S. (2005) Construct-Irrelevant Variance in High-Stakes Testing. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice. 23(1), pp.17-27

Schwartz, S., Evans, C. and Agur, A. (2014) Comparison of physical therapy anatomy performance and anxiety scores in timed and untimed practical tests. Anatomical Sciences Education. 8(6), pp.518-524

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Parkman, A., (2016). The imposter phenomenon in higher education: Incidence and impact. Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 16(1), p.51.

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Tuller, M. and Pinto, J. (2010) Effects of anxiety on attention and visual memory. Journal of Vision. 5(8), pp.389-389