Objective, Structured Proforma to Score the Merit of Scientific Presentations

Around 100,000 medical conferences are organized all over the world and hence, they form an integral part of a medical professional’s life. Oral presentations, especially award sessions, are judged by a panel of faculty judges who score individual presentations on various aspects including content, delivery and submission. Our objective was to compare the scores given by student-judges and faculty-judges for scientific presentations using the standardized score sheet. An objective, structured score-sheet was designed using existing literature. Five presentations, all made using PowerPoint, were judged using the structured score-sheet by seven student-judges and two-faculty judges. The mean score of all the score-sheets ( n = 45) was 38.5 + 5.4 (out of a maximum score of 50). There was no statistical difference between mean scores assigned by students or faculty ( p = 0.2). Thus, an objective, structured score sheet like ours, when used to judge scientific presentations, gave uniform results even when judges hailed from different levels of the medical hierarchy.