Introduction:

In Spain, in order to gain access to specialised medical training it is mandatory to take the MIR exam. After passing said exam, the candidates can access training in different hospitals all around the country.

Subjects and methods:

This research was made using a database of the answers of 3,712 candidates who took the 2015 MIR exam.

Results:

The difficulty and discrimination index of all the questions in the exam were calculated. All the questions were analysed, taking into account the values of those parameters and classified by subject, block and kind of question. On average, those questions that were found to be most difficult correspond to the following subjects: physiology, pharmacology, geriatrics, traumatology, neurology and palliative care. The subjects with the least average difficulty were anatomical pathology, anaesthesiology, plastic surgery, communication skills, genetics and infectious diseases.

Conclusions:

Overall, the discrimination and difficulty values of the questions in the MIR exam are sufficient. The exam is more discriminatory for those students with the lowest discrimination levels, with percentile 25 having the highest levels. Finally, we propose that item response theory be employed as a support tool in order to decide which exam questions would be nullified.

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