Multiple Mini Viva as an Online Assessment Tool for Postgraduate Anatomy Programme: The USM’s Experience Amidst COVID-19 Pandemic

Assessment is fundamental to student learning as it shapes student learning behaviour. Designing a holistic assessment is a demanding task because it involves evaluations of both cognitive and noncognitive competencies. The unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19 has led to many changes in the assessment practice of higher education institutions. To ensure the sustainability of education provision to all students, assessment activities in higher education institutions are mainly conducted through online platform, and the task becomes more challenging. Hence, we introduce a new holistic assessment method, the multiple mini viva (MMV), that is used in the assessment of the Master of Science (Clinical Anatomy) programme in Universiti Sains Malaysia. The MMV was adopted from the framework of multiple mini interview that is commonly used for the student selection process in medical and allied health sciences programmes. This form of assessment was first implemented to address the drawbacks of the classical viva voce, and it could assess students’ cognitive skills, including various interpersonal competencies such as communication skills, critical thinking and professional behaviour. In this article, we describe the practice of the classical face-to-face and online MMV with regard to its purpose, process, advantages and challenges. The implications and suggestions for the future practice of anatomy assessment are also elaborated.