Are the shelf exams really scaled to a 70 (for US MD students)?

[RedPeony]

It seems like at my school some shelfs (like psych) the mean is like 84 and others it's lower. Thanks!

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[4thQTHailMary]

Could be wrong but I thought I read where Psych is now 80. I know for a fact IM is 78 sd 8 now.

 

[qwerty89]

it was scaled to a 70 but that was years ago. As with Step scores the averages have increased year over year.

 

[Elixir6]

I read the NBME website before out of curiosity - qwerty89 is correct

 

[Instatewaiter]

when I was a med student we had to take paper shelf exams and they were scaled to 70... damn kids these days

 

[operaman]

Yeah, the 70 is scaled to mean 70, just like a 220 on Step 1 is scaled to mean 220 -- it's just an arbitrary scale. That was probably the average at some point way back, but the whole point of scaling is simply to keep the meaning of the score consistent between exams over the years, correcting for difficulty, etc. This is not universally understood, even among faculty. The NBME will send you (ie. your school) norms tables for your administration of each exam, both compared to your classmates and nationally. They will also provide norm tables that correct for when the exam was taken (ie. a 75 in August is a different percentile than a 75 in April).

There is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding NBME exams, boards, etc. My favorite is people who don't understand than the 3-digit scores for step1 and step2 are completely unrelated, so they say things like "I got a 240 on step 1, but went up to a 250 on step 2!" In reality, their score went down to a lower percentile even though the 3-digit score was higher (see norms tables published by the NBME in October '14). In much the same way, the scaled scores for shelves are their own unique entities for each exam, scaled for consistency across many years of exams. National and class averages are published with each administration just like they are for boards.

 

[Apoplexy__]

If anyone is curious, I believe the NBME practice test site says somewhere that the original scaling was created in 1990.

 

[Psai]

when I was a med student we had to take paper shelf exams and they were scaled to 70... damn kids these days

we graduated out of the stone age some time ago, gramps

 

[Instatewaiter]

we graduated out of the stone age some time ago, gramps

You goddam kids with your rap music and your Harry Connick Jr. get off my lawn.