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NBME progress tests and USMLE step 1 results

LW Ling Wang
HL Heather S. Laird-Fick
CP Carol J. Parker
DS David Solomon
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The CBSE is a 200-item multiple-choice question (MCQ) exam made available by the NBME as a representative test blueprinted against the Step 1 content outline. Students receive scaled scores for the total test. Because there are a limited number of forms of the CBSE available at any given time, we also utilized the NBME’s Customized Assessment Services (CAS) to create examinations. These examinations were blueprinted to provide subscores for categories corresponding to disciplines integrated within our curriculum. NBME generated both total test percent correct scores and locally scaled scores for the total test and individual content areas we defined during the test construction phase. Percent correct scores from CAS tests were used for our analysis. Among the ten NBME tests, there were six CAS and four CBSE tests for the 2016 cohort and five CAS and five CBSE test for the 2017 cohort.

The USMLE Step 1 is a large multiple choice question (MCQ) exam given nationally to medical students to test their basic science and, to some extent, clinical knowledge. Total score is reported, with a maximum of 300 and a minimum passing score of 194 established as of January 1, 2018. Step 1 scores on first attempts in the cohort ranged from 154 to 269, with mean score 230.5. A total of seventeen students failed (score < 194). Figure 1 shows the scatterplots between each iteration of NBME test versus Step 1 results.

Scatter plots for NBME test versus Step 1 results

Copyright and License information: The Author(s) ©2021
Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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