Experimental Questions

[taare]

So apparently, I hear there will be experimental questions in the exam that are not accounted for anything. How many can one expect and are these spread out equally? For eg - 5 per block (as the DIT guy claims ) or can i encounter 10-15 in one block itself.

Just wondering if anyone may have a slight guess about the amount of questions that will be experimental.

Thanks

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[jmcappleby]

So apparently, I hear there will be experimental questions in the exam that are not accounted for anything. How many can one expect and are these spread out equally? For eg - 5 per block (as the DIT guy claims ) or can i encounter 10-15 in one block itself.

Just wondering if anyone may have a slight guess about the amount of questions that will be experimental.

Thanks

As I understood it, one full block's worth of questions are experimental. That means 48 (or 46 as per the new) divided over 7 blocks. ~7 per block.

Which is probably why people can leave a block feeling like they were guessing a good chunk of the time and still probably do better than expected.

*gulp*

 

[kryptik]

I dont think anyone can put a number on the amount of experimental questions

 

[rrrrr]

i'm not an expert at this, but i think if you see a typo in a question, its probably experimental. for example, i had a question where the stem mentioned huntingtin protein, but the answer choices spelled it huntington protein. i certainly hope that was an experimental question.. cuz i probably choked on it. lol

 

[lord_jeebus]

Anybody who tells you how many experimental questions there are, or how they are distributed, is either misinformed, a liar, or in violation with some sort of NBME nondisclosure agreement.

 

[jmcappleby]

Anybody who tells you how many experimental questions there are, or how they are distributed, is either misinformed, a liar, or in violation with some sort of NBME nondisclosure agreement.

Aah, I see... mine was just a random guess based on stuff I read. I haven't taken the test yet... First Aid (2009) is where I read it, I believe. That 10-20% may be experimental. Which correlates to about 1 in 7, I guess.

Of course, this is not to be taken as hard fact.

 

[trgf]

From reading what you guys have written it seems as though experimental questions can include only tough ones which noone has been able to answer before. But if you think about it, shouldn't there be a fair spread of difficulty? If you were an exam writer, wouldn't you try to take a more holistic approach and derive a statistically significant result by testing students across different levels and depths?