
RESEARCH LIBRARY
RESEARCH LIBRARY
View the latest publications from members of the NBME research team
Academic Medicine: Volume 99 - Issue 3 - p 325-330
This retrospective cohort study investigates the association between United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) scores and outcomes in 196,881 hospitalizations in Pennsylvania over 3 years.
Academic Medicine: Volume 99 - Issue 2 - p 192-197
This report investigates the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, exemplified by ChatGPT, to perform on the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), following reports of its successful performance on sample items.
Advances in Health Sciences Education
Recent advancements enable replacing MCQs with SAQs in high-stakes assessments, but prior research often used small samples under low stakes and lacked time data. This study assesses difficulty, discrimination, and time in a large-scale high-stakes context
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023), Pages 443-447
This paper presents the ACTA system, which performs automated short-answer grading in the domain of high-stakes medical exams. The system builds upon previous work on neural similarity-based grading approaches by applying these to the medical domain and utilizing contrastive learning as a means to optimize the similarity metric.
Advancing Natural Language Processing in Educational Assessment
This book examines the use of natural language technology in educational testing, measurement, and assessment. Recent developments in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled large-scale educational applications, though scholars and professionals may lack a shared understanding of the strengths and limitations of NLP in assessment as well as the challenges that testing organizations face in implementation. This first-of-its-kind book provides evidence-based practices for the use of NLP-based approaches to automated text and speech scoring, language proficiency assessment, technology-assisted item generation, gamification, learner feedback, and beyond.
Diagnosis: Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages 54-60
This op-ed discusses the advantages of leveraging natural language processing (NLP) in the assessment of clinical reasoning. It also provides an overview of INCITE, the Intelligent Clinical Text Evaluator, a scalable NLP-based computer-assisted scoring system that was developed to measure clinical reasoning ability as assessed in the written documentation portion of the now-discontinued USMLE Step 2 Clinical Skills examination.
Academic Medicine: Volume 97 - Issue 11S - Page S176
As Step 1 begins to transition to pass/fail, it is interesting to consider the impact of score goal on wellness. This study examines the relationship between goal score, gender, and students’ self-reported anxiety, stress, and overall distress immediately following their completion of Step 1.
Academic Medicine: Volume 97 - Issue 8 - Pages 1219-1225
Since 2012, the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) has maintained a policy of ≤ 6 attempts on any examination component. The purpose of this study was to empirically examine the appropriateness of existing USMLE retake policy.
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies - p 2880–2886
This paper presents a corpus of 43,985 clinical patient notes (PNs) written by 35,156 examinees during the high-stakes USMLE® Step 2 Clinical Skills examination.
Applied Psychological Measurement: Volume 46, issue 6, page(s) 529-547
The current simulation study demonstrated that the sampling variance associated with the item response theory (IRT) item parameter estimates can help detect outliers in the common items under the 2-PL and 3-PL IRT models. The results showed the proposed sampling variance statistic (SV) outperformed the traditional displacement method with cutoff values of 0.3 and 0.5 along a variety of evaluation criteria.