Subject Examination Scores

The subject examination score is scaled to have a mean of 70 and a standard deviation of 8 for a group of approximately 10,000 first-time takers from 80+ schools who took the Medicine Subject Examination as a final clerkship exam following rotations during the 1993-94 academic year. As a result, the vast majority of scores range from 45 to 95, and although the scores have the "look and feel" of percent-correct scores, they are not. This scale provides a useful tool for comparing the scores of your students with those of a large, nationally representative group taking the Medicine Subject Examination as an end-of-clerkship assessment.

The subject examination scores are statistically equated across test administrations. Scores are statistically adjusted for shifts in test difficulty and consequently, can be used to track school and student performance over time.

Precision of Scores

Measurement error is present on all tests, and the standard error of measurement (SEM) provides an index of the (im)precision of scores.  The SEM indicates how far the score an examinee earns on the examination is likely to stray from his/her “true” proficiency level. The SEM is approximately 4 points for the Medicine Subject Examination scores. Using the SEM, it is possible to calculate a score interval that indicates how much a score might vary across repeated testing using different sets of items covering the same content.  An interval that will encompass about two thirds of the observed scores for a given true score may be found by adding the SEM to a score and subtracting it from that score.  For example, if a student’s true proficiency on the examination is 60, the score he/she achieved on the examination will usually (two times out of three) fall between 56 and 64  (60 - 4 and 60 + 4).

Score Feedback

Summary information on the examinee group tested, exam purpose and number of items scored is provided on each page of the feedback.

If two or more examinees were tested, Scaled Score Descriptive Statistics for reported scores, including the mean, standard deviation, the lowest and highest scores for the examinees tested is provided.

The Roster of Scaled Scores reports a total test Medicine Subject Examination score and content area subscores (if available) for each examinee.  Reported scores also appear in a comma separated text file that can be downloaded and used to export scores.

If two or more examinees were tested, a Frequency Distribution of the total scaled score is provided.  The distribution shows the number and percentage of examinees with each score, together with the cumulative frequency and percentage.

Keyword Phrase Item Analysis

If ten or more students were tested, a Keyword Phrase Item Analysis Report is provided. This report provides a keyword phrase describing the content of each item on the examination, along with the proportion of the examinees from your school and a projected proportion of examinees nationally that answered each item correctly.

Norms

Total year and quarterly norms are provided to help aid in the interpretation of student performance.  The norms reflect the performance of first-time taker students from LCME-accredited medical schools who took the exam as a final clerkship exam across an entire academic year.  The two most recent sets of norms that have been developed for this exam have been provided for your convenience.  Norms will be updated to reflect the most recent academic year of data during the fourth quarter. Please note that we changed how student performance is defined and captured in the percentile ranks for the norm tables. Using the school-reported start date (when available) of the first rotation for each clinical exam, examinees were assigned to the appropriate quarter based on test date.