Thanks for the input. I've heard that 50-55% is the usual cutoff for passing on the APMLE. I've been scoring above that on BoardVitals and practice exams, but is that number usually reasonable in your experiences?
The release from APMLE states that passing cutoff can range anywhere from 55%-75%. Understanding how they arrive at that number and why requires a Masters degree in the dark arts, but essentially they slide the scale so that anywhere between 8-20% of 1st time test takers fail. (the higher end of that scale may be a tad high).
Kinda sucks, especially since you could simply get a tough draw of questions, or disproportionate subject material (heavy on histo/neuro).
The upside is that there is, generally speaking, no material consequence to failing the 1st time, and the 2nd time you just have to meet a certain score threshold, which I believe is 50%-ish.
There's a very detailed report accounting how the exam is made, scored, etc. somewhere on NBPME's website called something like the Audit Panel Report. It's about 20 pages long though so I'll sum up some key points here. If you're really interested in the exact way its scored you can look up the modified Angoff method (used to score our board exam and most board exams).
The percentage that you need to pass will be unique to your exam. That allows a sort of standardization for difficulty, where someone with an easier exam will require a higher percentage to pass and someone with a more difficult exam will require a lower percentage to pass. The percentage needed to pass on your exam is scaled to a 75. That 75 is the scaled score, which is not a percentage, which is where most people get lost. On a difficult exam a scaled score of 75 might only require answering 60% correct, on an easier exam a scaled score of 75 might require answering 80% correct—now that they're using LOFT the passing percentages shouldn't be quite so drastically different between exams, I'm just trying to make a point. So let's say you have the harder exam and it's scaled so that you need 60% to get the 75 scaled score and pass. Anything from 0-59% is scaled to be 55-74. So the lowest scaled score you could possibly get is a 55, which would be 0% correct. The current bulletin reads
"Failing candidates will receive a report with a failing scale score (between 55 and 74)." That's what that means. They don't say how high the scaled score goes but it really doesn't matter since its minimal competency, if you reach or exceed the cut score you simply get a "pass" result. The only reason the exam is scaled is for easy comparison between different years, since the question bank is different year to year.
So how is the cut score, the percentage you need, determined? I'm going to simplify the heck out of it, but you can look up the nitty gritty details if you want. Basically, a group of podiatrists looks over each question and determines the odds that a "minimally competent" podiatrist would answer that question correctly. They'll assign each question a percentage like a hard question might be 20% and an easy one might be 80%. Now let's say you have a test with 5 questions rated 20% (hard), 40% (medium), 60% (medium), 80% (easy), and 100% (easy). You can basically average those out to get your cut score of 60%. So on this specific test, a 60% is equivalent to a scaled score of 75 which would be a passing score. Now on the actual exam each question is actually weighted the exact same. So on our imaginary test you would need 60% to pass and that could be done in a number of ways including by (1) correctly answering the two easy questions and one medium difficulty question or (2) correctly answering the one hard question and two medium difficulty questions. This is an important concept to understand when studying because no matter how many easy, medium, or hard questions a particular exam is made of, you can see that the easy and medium questions will pretty much always get you to the cut score—I keep saying easy, medium, and hard because that's a simplified way of how LOFT (the algorithm they now use to make the exam) will assign you questions, giving everybody about the same number of easy, medium, and hard questions. Theoretically it should always be more worth your time to learn the very basic and fundamental facts of a subject before getting bogged down in the more specific and difficult details, since they've pretty much designed the exam to not expect you to answer the difficult questions correctly anyway.
That being said, not even NBPME knows exactly how much you will need to pass, that just depends on the exact question set you get. Also keep in mind that about 50ish questions are only on the exam to gather statistics for future use and do not count towards your cut score and do not have to meet the exam breakdown specifications (25% LEA, 13% physio, etc.). In addition, for any scored questions that perform poorly statistically, everyone is given the point for that question.
Now since they allowed backtracking as of the last administration of part 1, the national 1st time pass rate jumped a few points from where it usually is from about 85% to about 88%. So having backtracking should slightly increase our chances of passing. But since they've reworked the specifications (percentage breakdown per subject) for this exam we're about to take who knows how that will affect the pass rate.
Lastly, good luck everyone.
