Empowering Faculty with AI-Enhanced Assessment Tools

We're excited to announce our latest platform update, which introduces significant enhancements to the ScholarRx ecosystem. This release focuses on streamlining the faculty experience through integrated assessment workflows, AI-powered content creation, and deeper analytics—all designed to save time while improving educational outcomes.

 

Meeting the Evolving Needs of Medical Education

Medical education faces unprecedented challenges: increasing knowledge density, accelerating scientific discoveries, and the need to prepare students for complex healthcare environments. Faculty members are asked to do more with the same amount of time—create engaging assessments, provide meaningful feedback, and continuously adapt their teaching strategies based on student performance.

This release addresses these challenges by integrating enhanced assessment tools directly into the faculty workflow, leveraging AI to accelerate content creation, and providing deeper insights into student learning patterns.

Integrated Test Management in Faculty Portal

We've reimagined how faculty create and manage assessments by integrating the "Manage Assignments" feature directly into the Faculty Portal. This consolidation eliminates the need to navigate between different applications, creating a seamless workflow from test creation to analysis.

The new interface organizes assessments into three categories—Published, Drafts, and Closed—making it simple to track the status of each test at a glance. Faculty can see key information including test type, assignment dates, question count, and student progress without having to open each test individually.

To facilitate a smooth transition, tests created in the original Qmax Management application will appear in the new "Manage Assignments" experience, and vice versa. Faculty can continue using either system during the transition period, with all changes synchronized between both interfaces.

AI-Powered Test Creation Methods

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this release is the introduction of two innovative methods for creating assessments, both leveraging advanced AI capabilities.

Question Assistant

The Question Assistant uses teaching with AI (TAI) to streamline the question discovery process. Faculty can:

• Upload documents to find questions that align with their content
• Enter natural language descriptions of the desired assessment
• Target specific question banks using the # symbol (e.g., #Qmax1)
• Focus on particular topics using the @ symbol (e.g., @Purine salvage deficiencies)

Results display comprehensive metadata for each question, including a new, intuitive difficulty rating system (Easy/Medium/Hard) that replaces the traditional P-value. Faculty can also see if questions have been used in previous assessments, helping prevent unintentional duplication.

High-Yield Topic Explorer

For faculty who prefer a more structured approach, the High-Yield Topic Explorer provides a hierarchical tree of medical topics organized by organ systems and disciplines. This method allows faculty to browse through categories, select relevant areas, and generate question sets based on their chosen topics.

The explorer includes filtering options by keyword, topic, discipline, organ system, and "Not Used Since" date, providing precise control over question selection. Faculty can even hide correct answers during the selection process to maintain objectivity when building assessments.

Both methods culminate in a drag-and-drop interface for arranging questions, followed by a streamlined process for configuring assessment parameters such as timing, availability, and student assignments.

Enhanced Analytics for Data-Driven Teaching

Our new Assignment Analysis page provides faculty with comprehensive insights into student performance. The analysis is divided into two complementary views:

1. Performance by Students: Displays individual student progress, including test status, submission date, performance metrics, and attempt history. Faculty can see not only how many questions each student got right or wrong but also track multiple attempts when retakes are enabled.
2. Performance by Question: Shows how the entire cohort performed on each question, with counts of correct, incorrect, and unanswered responses. Questions can be sorted by their original order, by most difficult, or by least difficult, helping faculty quickly identify challenging concepts.

Faculty can download detailed Excel reports containing student results and question performance data, facilitating deeper offline analysis or integration with other institutional assessment systems.

Using TAI to Create Questions Based on Bricks

We've further integrated our Brick content with assessment workflows by enabling TAI-driven question generation directly from ScholarRx Bricks. Faculty with the 'Faculty Qmax Author' role can now generate questions in three styles:

• Basic Recall: Simple recall questions without clinical scenarios
• Short Clinical: Brief clinical scenarios (≤ 30 words)
• Extended Clinical: Comprehensive clinical vignettes (50+ words) in USMLE style

This feature better connects learning content and assessment, ensuring tight alignment between what students learn and how they're evaluated. The generated questions can be reviewed, regenerated with specific instructions, and rated for accuracy before being saved to your organization's bank.

Student-Centered Improvements

Students benefit from this release as well, with enhanced options for test retakes and detailed performance analytics:

• Self-created tests can be retaken an unlimited number of times
• Faculty-created tests can allow retakes when enabled during creation
• Students can view detailed statistics for each test attempt
• Performance breakdowns by difficulty, discipline, and organ system help students identify areas for focused study

These features encourage a growth mindset by allowing students to learn from their mistakes and track their improvement over time.

Additional Enhancements

Several other notable improvements round out this release:

• Institutional Onboarding Reports: Cohort Managers can download comprehensive reports on onboarding completion
• Streamlined Qmax Create Access: Direct menu options for Qmax Create from various applications
• Organizational Roster Filtering: New ability to filter the roster by accommodation status
• Faculty Portal Renaming: The "Stats & Analytics" dashboard has been renamed to "Faculty," reflecting its expanded role as a comprehensive platform

Looking Ahead

This release represents a significant step in our ongoing mission to create the most effective, efficient, and user-friendly platform for medical education. The integration of TAI, streamlined workflows, and enhanced analytics sets the foundation for even more innovation in the future.

The Manage Assignments feature is currently available as a beta option, which can be enabled from your profile menu in the Faculty Portal. We encourage all faculty to try these new features and provide feedback as we continue to refine and expand our platform.

Thank you for being part of the ScholarRx community. We're excited to see how these tools enhance your teaching and your students' learning experiences.

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For more details, visit our Knowledge Base or contact us directly.