Academic Medicine: Volume 97 - Issue 4 - Pages 467-477
Letter to the editor; response to D'Eon and Kleinheksel.
Journal of Applied Technology: Volume 23 - Special Issue 1 - Pages 30-40
The interpretations of test scores in secure, high-stakes environments are dependent on several assumptions, one of which is that examinee responses to items are independent and no enemy items are included on the same forms. This paper documents the development and implementation of a C#-based application that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques to produce prioritized predictions of item enemy statuses within a large item bank.
Journal of Educational Measurement: Volume 58, Issue 4, Pages 515-537
In this paper, the NBME team reports the results an eye-tracking study designed to evaluate how the presence of the options in multiple-choice questions impacts the way medical students responded to questions designed to evaluate clinical reasoning. Examples of the types of data that can be extracted are presented. We then discuss the implications of these results for evaluating the validity of inferences made based on the type of items used in this study.
Academic Medicine: Volume 96 - Issue 9 - Pages 1324-1331
This study examines associations between USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 Clinical Knowledge (CK) scores and ACGME emergency medicine (EM) milestone ratings.
Academic Medicine: Volume 96 - Issue 9 - Pages 1319-1323
This study examined the relationship between USMLE attempts and the likelihood of receiving disciplinary actions from state medical boards.
Teaching and Learning in Medicine: Volume 33 - Issue 4 - p 366-381
CSE scores for students from eight schools that moved Step 1 after core clerkships between 2012 and 2016 were analyzed in a pre-post format. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to quantify the effect of the curriculum on CSE performance. Additional analysis determined if clerkship order impacted clinical subject exam performance and whether the curriculum change resulted in more students scoring in the lowest percentiles before and after the curricular change.
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
This paper brings together approaches from the fields of NLP and psychometric measurement to address the problem of predicting examinee proficiency from responses to short-answer questions (SAQs).
Academic Medicine: March 2019 - Volume 94 - Issue 3 - p 314-316
The United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 2 Clinical Skills (CS) exam uses physician raters to evaluate patient notes written by examinees. In this Invited Commentary, the authors describe the ways in which the Step 2 CS exam could benefit from adopting a computer-assisted scoring approach that combines physician raters’ judgments with computer-generated scores based on natural language processing (NLP).
Journal of Educational Measurement: Volume 55, Issue 2, Pages 308-327
The widespread move to computerized test delivery has led to the development of new approaches to evaluating how examinees use testing time and to new metrics designed to provide evidence about the extent to which time limits impact performance. Much of the existing research is based on these types of observational metrics; relatively few studies use randomized experiments to evaluate the impact time limits on scores. Of those studies that do report on randomized experiments, none directly compare the experimental results to evidence from observational metrics to evaluate the extent to which these metrics are able to sensitively identify conditions in which time constraints actually impact scores. The present study provides such evidence based on data from a medical licensing examination.
The authors examined the extent to which USMLE scores relate to the odds of receiving a disciplinary action from a U.S. state medical board.