New Shelf Grading

Started by seminoma
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seminoma

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7+ Year Member
Curious to hear opinions on the new system. Obviously it affects everyone the same, but should our approach be different now?
 
Cytarabine said:
New system? What happened?
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The NBME periodically reviews key aspects of its examination programs consistent with best practices and national standards for high-quality testing programs. After extensive study, the NBME clinical science subject examinations will be rescaled to better reflect recent trends in the performance of the examinee population. As part of this process, item difficulty estimates will be updated based on a more recent group of examinees. This rescaling work will help to maintain the robustness of the clinical science subject examinations as well as the validity and usefulness of the scores reported.

Rescaling also presents the opportunity to introduce a new score scale. To facilitate the interpretation and use of the examination scores reported, the new score scale was designed according to a classic "percent correct" metric. This will allow subject examination results to be more easily incorporated into your school's grading schemes, alongside other measures.
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Emphasis mine, and quote is from the "previously announced" link (that you can find below). This probably doesn't affect most US MD students, but my school happens to report our shelf scores. I don't know what the old system was, but I doubt raw scores were % correct.. which makes me think that reported scores will be lower than in previous years.

http://www.nbme.org/PDF/Schools/SubjectExams/Rescaling.pdf
 
This probably doesn't affect most US MD students, but my school happens to report our shelf scores.
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seminoma said:
Curious to hear opinions on the new system. Obviously it affects everyone the same, but should our approach be different now?
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Probably just try to do as well as you can regardless...

I'm also curious as to how it compares to the old system numbers-wise, but I really couldn't see how this would change anyone's approach to shelf prep.
 
It may cause schools to change their formula for clerkship grading. Our school doesn't report scores but it does use the national percentile to calculate clerkship grade. If that goes down (or up?), they'd need to adjust.
 
I don't see how it's any different. One number that I don't understand exchanged for another number I don't understand based on voodoo
 
Psai said:
I don't see how it's any different. One number that I don't understand exchanged for another number I don't understand based on voodoo
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Seems like there's less room for error now especially if your school uses x-score for honors cutoff. Obviously we'll all still fall in a similar place relative to everyone nationwide in terms of shelf score, but who knows if an 80 raw was something like 75% correct.. now when you take the shelf you'll get a 75% and no honors vs last year you probably got honors if 80 was your school's cutoff.
 
seminoma said:
Seems like there's less room for error now especially if your school uses x-score for honors cutoff. Obviously we'll all still fall in a similar place relative to everyone nationwide in terms of shelf score, but who knows if an 80 raw was something like 75% correct.. now when you take the shelf you'll get a 75% and no honors vs last year you probably got honors if 80 was your school's cutoff.
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Our school received a equivalency table and adjusted the pass/honors scores accordingly
 
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