We the medical students of the University of Tasmania petition the School of Medicine to allow students to take the paper containing our question stems with our notes written on them with us into the station during our fourth year OSCEs.

With the recent change to the 2 minute reading time, we appreciate that the question stems have been modified accordingly and believe that students should be allowed to directly annotate the question stem without having to rewrite out the information provided which allows a much more effective utilisation of the brief 2 minute reading time.

Additionally this also minimises the amount of materials which need to be referred to during the OSCE station as students are able to easily refer to their own notes which are annotated to the relevant areas of the question stem instead of having to refer to written notes and laminated copy of the task present inside the station.

We also propose for the question stem to then be handed to the examiners prior to leaving the station to ensure that no stems can be unfairly distributed to other students.

This practice has been successfully implemented in the past at the Launceston Clinical School and we as students would like to see this practice adopted across all clinical schools. This petition contains the names of the students who would like to see this practice be implemented during the fourth year OSCEs for 2014.