Are NBME Step 2 CK self assessments still valid?

yes nbme are still valid, 2 and 4 are the most accurate but anyone will predict withing +/- 10 points

I doubt they changed the question pool all that much, the NBMEs should be fine.

in light of the usmle people discovering their q bank had been breached (via that test prep company...you can see it on the usmle website) i think this new 44 format ck test is from a brand new question pool. i think any old nbme tests, uw, kaplan, and any other q banks are no longer good predictors of scores. just my theory (and based on my experience with the exam)

jey2283 said:

in light of the usmle people discovering their q bank had been breached (via that test prep company...you can see it on the usmle website) i think this new 44 format ck test is from a brand new question pool. i think any old nbme tests, uw, kaplan, and any other q banks are no longer good predictors of scores. just my theory (and based on my experience with the exam)

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I think the leaked test items were related to step 1 and usmle specifically refers to step 1 on their website. As far as changing of the pool of questions is concerned, it is laughable to think they will change the whole q bank(which may contain >10k q's) at any one time. The modifications are going time to time in every nbme test whereby they put in a fresh pool of q's(not change the whole qbank) which are albeit tested as experimental q's ist to factor in their statistical bs.

it has nothing to do with step 2, that company leaked step1 questions.... and what do you mean "based on your experience with the exam", you didnt think the exam was like any questions out there?
and a whole brand new question pool..... you know how long that would take.
i'm sure they made some changes, it's not all new questions.

I don't believe that they could change the entire question pool. It would take entirely too long to restandardize and they wouldn't have any past data to base it off of. To keep it properly standardized, I think they have to slowly cycle in new questions so they have the rest of the question performance to base the scoring off of.

jey2283 said:

in light of the usmle people discovering their q bank had been breached (via that test prep company...you can see it on the usmle website) i think this new 44 format ck test is from a brand new question pool. i think any old nbme tests, uw, kaplan, and any other q banks are no longer good predictors of scores. just my theory (and based on my experience with the exam)

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Your reasoning doesn't make any sense if you think about it. The nbme tests were good predictors of performance for CK prior to the change from 46-->44. I think it's very safe to say that performance on CK a month ago would correlate well to performance on the new CK (for example, someone who scored 250 a month ago would most likely score very close to 250 this month and vice versa). Because of those facts, I have to assume that the nbme exams will still correlate closely to performance on the new CK tests. The same thing happened last summer when we took step 1, they were changing from 50-->48 questions and I don't think there was any change in scores.

Even if they did rewrite the entire USMLE Step 2 CK question pool (I'm sure they didn't), they would rewrite them in a way that the difficulty and subject matter was basically the exact same and by the time they had a large statistical sample to work with, the scores would end up being the same. So, yeah, the NBME exams are still fine.

tfom08 said:

Your reasoning doesn't make any sense if you think about it. The nbme tests were good predictors of performance for CK prior to the change from 46-->44. I think it's very safe to say that performance on CK a month ago would correlate well to performance on the new CK (for example, someone who scored 250 a month ago would most likely score very close to 250 this month and vice versa). Because of those facts, I have to assume that the nbme exams will still correlate closely to performance on the new CK tests. The same thing happened last summer when we took step 1, they were changing from 50-->48 questions and I don't think there was any change in scores.

Even if they did rewrite the entire USMLE Step 2 CK question pool (I'm sure they didn't), they would rewrite them in a way that the difficulty and subject matter was basically the exact same and by the time they had a large statistical sample to work with, the scores would end up being the same. So, yeah, the NBME exams are still fine.

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LoL that's the fun of speculating . If questions are leaked for step one, you don't think they would rewrite the bank? Why change one bank and not the rest? Why spend 2 months tallying scores if everything was the same? every question changed? Yeah, probably not. But, i bet more then any other year, more questions were added/removed. Who knows All i can see (from just talking to my friends in the terms above me) is that they felt solid on the exam. All my friends that took the new bank....didn't feel solid (not fearing a fail,,,,just not feeling like they rocked it). We did feel like we rocked step one after leaving the center. i miss the feeling of a rock

And just to add: i'm NOT saying DON"T do the NBMEs. i think practicing with questions can really help EVEN if the questions are entirely different. it helps you to think quickly. i just wouldn't put much weight in it. Again i don't know my scores yet...SOON

Good luck!

I suppose the main point is "am I going to pass, or how am I going to score?". I agree with all of the opinions here, they all sound reasonable, and they wouldn't need to write 14,000 new questions in the first month, 2-3000 would do for now.

Either way, the length of statistical input of test takers into the score estimator bank would still give you fairly accurate results, and I'd think more accurate if you average somewhere between your Uworld predictor and NBME predictor.

I just took it, and my test had very few "most common", or easily recognizable scenarios. 80% were longer, and more confounding distractors than 90% of Uworld questions. I had a very hard time staying on time.

Get a lot of sleep.

I think these assessments are still valid.

Psych2014 said:

I suppose the main point is "am I going to pass, or how am I going to score?". I agree with all of the opinions here, they all sound reasonable, and they wouldn't need to write 14,000 new questions in the first month, 2-3000 would do for now.

Either way, the length of statistical input of test takers into the score estimator bank would still give you fairly accurate results, and I'd think more accurate if you average somewhere between your Uworld predictor and NBME predictor.

I just took it, and my test had very few "most common", or easily recognizable scenarios. 80% were longer, and more confounding distractors than 90% of Uworld questions. I had a very hard time staying on time.

Get a lot of sleep.

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What you mention continues to be a real problem.. the practice test, the one available on the USMLE website, is so unlike the actual exam that, from my amateur legal opinion, it borders on false advertising... !

My English writing skills are high enough that I've needed an extra 9 months just to acquire the skills for digesting and spitting out the randomness and unique twisted logic of their sentence structures... (a sentence structure that would have never gotten a philosophy major past the 2nd year undergraduate level)

If they are going to continue to write confusingly written question, (there are too many questions on this exam that wouldn't be acceptable to a high school English teacher) they should at least standardize them to a maximum length; for example, all questions need to be within x number of lines... it is so annoying that this is partly a "reading exam"...

There should really be more transparency, rather than the attitude .. "this is what I did on the exam, so it is fine"...

As an older graduate, what is particularly mystifying to me is that everyone writing the test is old enough to know how much the exam has changed, but there is either no awareness of why it has changed, or at least no acknowledgement that the Step 2 exam of 20 years ago had a very different format.

At the same time, I would be the first to admit that a medical grad is better trained today, than one of 20 years ago, but I think that is due to better clinical training, and not what has happened to Step 2..