getting 50 on the shelf

[cosine]

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So my school requires that you get a 50 or higher on the shelf exams to pass the class, how difficult is it to get a score like that? what does a 50 even mean?

 

[lord_jeebus]

50 is a very low score. If you are scoring in the 50s, you would be doing something wrong and would need to fix things or risk failing Step 2.

I think my school requires 65, which is pretty low.

I believe the scores are on a 1-99 scale, which is not a percent, but I'm not sure.

 

[leodavis]

as I understand them, shelfs (the ones I've taken anyway) have raw scores (700 or 800 pts, I think?) and percentiles, based on national performance..."50" most likely means 50th percentile, since 50/800 is like 6% correct, lol.

NBME's subject exam policies (pdf)

For the basic science disciplines, the subject examination score is scaled to have a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100 for a specific group of first–time takers who took the examination as an end-of-course or end-of-year assessment.

 

[Green Chimneys]

No way that a school could make you break the 50th percentile nationally. That would be absurd as half the students taking the exam score below that.

The clinical shelf exams are graded such that the mean is 70 and the SD is 8. That means that ~98-99% of the students nationally should be scoring 50 or better. Hope that gives you a little perspective and puts your mind at ease.

 

[aarathi]

50 is very lower score

 

[MadameLULU]

Moving to clinical rotations

 

[cosine]

just to clarify, i'm not taking a clinical shelf, its my shelf for histology and anatomy

 

[71263]

The passing score for Shelf exams at my school vary with each rotation. For neuro it was 55, and the avg was 65. For peds, it was 60 to pass, with the avg at 70. As there are 100 questions on the test, I would think the scores would be raw, but Im not certain. I also think that these Shelf questions are harder than what Step II would be (I found this to be the truth for my M2 Shelf exams vs. USMLE Step I).