Self-Assessment as a Strategy for the Development of Lifelong and Selfdirected Learning in Physiology in a Mexican Medical School

Self-assessment has been defined as the process through which students decide whether or not they have achieved the defined standards. In this sense, selfevaluation is part of self-assessment and is a useful tool to identify weaknesses and strengths in medical students. We consider that self-evaluation is fundamental to promote in our medical students the development of one of the competencies of our curriculum, competency 2: self-directed and permanent learning. In this sense, the COVID-19 pandemic faced our teachers with great challenges, such as the paradigm shift and the migration to a completely virtual environment in a relatively short time. In this work we developed and applied a self-evaluation tool in medical students of the second-year physiology course. Subsequently, we obtained comments that we classified into higher ratings and lower ratings and subsequently analyzed. We compared these results with an objective test that assessed disciplinary knowledge of physiology. We found that the students self-evaluate significantly higher than their grades in the objective test. We believe that selfevaluation should be conceived as a test of confidence and maturity of our students and that we should be aware that there is subjectivity in evaluating it and the latter enriches the quantitative results of the evaluation.