"As a result of its review, the Management Committee decided to raise the recommended Step 2 CK minimum passing score from 203 to 209. This change will be applied to Step 2 CK examinees testing on or after July 1, 2014." -usmle.org
Posted Jun 2, 2014, 1:57 PM UTC
Well I dont think anyone here wants to be stuck with a 203 anyway. Man I need to get off reddit
Trust me, you'd rather take a pass rather than fail a Step.
The latter happened to my brother like five years ago. His school made him take a review course and held him back for an entire year to fit it in his schedule. Wasted an entire year of his life, and cost him $45,000 in tuition (plus losing an entire year of future wages if you think about it).
Anyway, I never understood that SDN/Reddit hivemind of "I'd rather fail than barely pass." No you wouldn't. If on the day your scores come out, you wouldn't panic over seeing a really low score, but then breathe a happy sigh of relief because it also says YOU FAILED. No one celebrates over the fact that they are below the pass line and put their entire MD career in jeopardy. You'd do anything to take a low pass in place of your fail.
Anyway, this isn't really directed at you, surendrarmc, it's just a mindset I see all over the internet. Everytime they raise the passing on a Step the only comments you see are "Good, I wouldn't want to pass with that score." And they ignore the fact that 7% of their colleagues fail Step every year (and another 10% wind up just a hair above the passing line and they spent weeks waiting for the score and losing sleep over whether or not they will make it). This people very, very much care about the passing line, and would do anything to be above it.
It just seems rather arrogant to say you'd rather have a fail than a low pass. Like a wealthy person going to Africa, seeing starving kids eating scraps, and then laughing at them saying "urgh, why would anyone eat that shit, I'd rather stave to death."
You are 100% on this.
A low score may limit options for future career.
Any failing score will limit options for a future career.
One of my friends said "If I wasn't on the beach drunk when I checked my score I would have freaked out.... Well at least I get to take it again instead of barely passing like a few people I know."
Yeah, I never understood the worry about minimum passing scores. If you are concerned that a bump in the min will fuck you over, you should be studying hard or reconsidering your career choices rather than following the min bumps.
But what does it mean with regards to what is the estimated average score?
Also, with the COMLEX they always keep the same scores as minimum passing (400) and the average (500). They just change what it takes or what it means to get those scores. I wonder why the USMLE doesn't use that system. Perhaps it's because people from all across the world take the USMLE while only US-educated students take the COMLEX.
I really don't know much at all about the COMLEX so I can't comment.
But the entire idea of the USMLE is sort of broken to begin with. It was never intended as a quantitative metric of a candidate's ability to be a physician. It was meant as simply a metric to pass as a minimum standard to progress. The breakdown of scores was for personal use so that you could focus on your weak areas as you progressed. It was only after that fact that residency programs then made the scores a quantitative metric of a candidate's qualifications for a residency program. This was because of both competition and a lack of other easy metrics by which to cull the applicant pool.
Does a 250 really mean you are that much smarter and will be that much better a doctor than someone with a 220? Does that mean people with 270's are the best conceivable physicians?
I'm only speculating here (maybe there is actual data out there to back up or refute, if so, please let me know) but it seems to me that the increase in minimum scores is based on the original (and still technically current) purpose of the USMLE to begin with - to make sure you are minimally competent to progress towards full and unrestricted licensure. So increasing the score means they are demanding a higher minimum competency standard.
It can't (or at least shouldn't) have any bearing on what the average score "means" or what a higher or lower score indicate relative to the min passing score. Those are set every year by nothing other than the people taking the exam. Which is why, particularly for residency, that is by far the more important thing to track (if you are going to track anything) - the mean and SD. You want to be able to be at least above the mean for more competitive programs. The more SD's above the mean you are the better. But nobody cares how much higher than the min passing score you are - just how much above and below the mean you are.
And, to my knowledge, those have stayed fairly steady (I looked it up real quick and it seems that they have gone up, with the largest jump this past year; however it has been mostly steady for many years with only a small trend to increase, and the mean score increases don't precisely correlate with min score increases. Something to ponder though) even as the min scores keep going up. In other words, the distribution stays fairly normal, they are just lopping off more and more of the bottom tail.
The COMLEX sounds like they go the other way around and define the scores based on the distribution. My undergrad science courses were like that. The class mean became an "80% B-" and then the scores were distributed normally around that mean such that there were always a specific number of each grade from A-F. That is one way of doing it and, depending on your purposes, completely valid. The USMLE is also expressly made such that (to within reality, of course) a score of 230 from 2014 means the same thing as a 230 from 2000. At least part of this is because in the medical sub-specialties (not so much surgical) they still use your USMLE scores as part of your fellowship application. It also allows for programs to keep a consistent cutoff (or change it) without trying to figure out if a 230 was "harder" this year or not.
Of course, these are adjusted, not raw, scores so who knows what kind of magic they do behind the scenes to get those numbers.
Once again, if I am wrong on certain points I'm happy to be corrected. But that is my understanding of things.
I didn't know that fellowships looked at USMLE step 1 when considering applicants. That's crazy! To me that sounds analogous to residency programs looking at your MCAT score, or med schools looking at your SAT score... how relevant could it possibly be?
Yeah, pretty much. They don't use them in surgical fellowships. Why? Because they have their yearly exams they take during residency (ABSITE and OIT for gen surg and ortho). Those scores become important for fellowships. In medicine, we don't have analogous exams and our fellowship application is a mere 2 years after graduation rather than 4 like surgery. So basically it is really because they, once again, have nothing better to go on.
I don't know how it is in other fields (since I only entertained surgery and ended up in internal medicine with 100% intention to do CC pulm) but want to hear a story that will blow your mind? My buddy matched into opthal (at UPitt which was his #1 and he interviewed at most of the top 10 programs in the country) and he was interviewing (I believe it was at Oklahoma, which is #1 in opthal) and the interviewer asked him about his undergrad grades. I shit you not.
It all just basically boils down to ways to make the interviewer/program have to deal with less interviews and less applicants. Numbers are easy. Got a 230 on your Step? Sweet. Move on to the next step. Got a 229? Some places won't even see your application because they have filters built into the ERAS app service to only download those with a certain minimum score (or any other of dozens of metrics they can filter apps with). Same for fellowship. No real data to back it up (and actually some to show it is stupid) but when you have hundreds if not thousands of people applying for just a few spots it is the easy thing to do.
I was asked about my SAT scores and highschool GPA during one of my interviews for medical school. I couldn't believe it.
Your comment about score continuity is the biggest point in my opinion. To change what it means to get a certain score goes against what a standardized test is supposed to show.
Your comment about score continuity is the biggest point in my opinion
Agreed.
I think the change in minimum score is due to the surge in medical school students and grads in recent years due to the increased demand for primary-care doctors. While the distribution is the same, the total number of test-takers are increasing and to maintain the same relative quality of passing applicants, they need to cut more of the bottom-tail off.
Possibly. I honestly don't know one way or another. I'd imagine it is many factors though and that could very easily be one of them
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This is probably an adjustment based on the rising average score.
just got my results… average score was a 238 with a standard deviation of 19! craziness.