RESUMEN
Objective Evaluating the effect of situational questions for qualifying the students'abilities in physiolo-gy examination .Methods Comparing the difficulty coefficients and discrimination indexes between situational and traditional choice questions .Results Compared with the traditional choice questions , the difficulty coefficient of situational questions increased , while the discrimination indexes were more reasonable .The discrimination indexes of situational understanding questions were higher than those of the traditional memory and understanding questions . There were no difference between discrimination indexes of the situational application questions and those of tradi -tional application questions .Conclusions Situational questions not only improved the quality of examinations , but also facilitate evaluating students'learning ability .