Annoyances,
Don't feel bad. I failed too. I am AOA, 4.0 with excellent clinical comments on all rotations, excellent letters of recommendations. Do I think I am a poor clinician? Absolutely not. Do I think the test is a crock of %^#@$%? Absolutely. My score report sounds exactly like yours. The only deficiency was data gathering which was off the board negative.
I took the test August 30th and received results Jan 14th via my dean and didn't receive the printout until two days ago. Totally irresponsible. I have a good friend who is a lawyer, and I am attempting to figure out a way to litigate these bastards. Luckily I did not report my score. Unfortunately, my dean recommended I call the program directors to personally talk with them which I did until the 4th one I called told me they hadn't received the report. Son of a! At any rate, they didn't particularly care except to worry if I would fulfill graduation requirements. I went to our student promotions committee and they voted to not require passing CS for graduation and sent letters to the PDs stating such.
Luckily, I had not called the PDs at prelim programs I applied to. I looked on FREIDA and saw that most of them require passage of CS before starting. Only 1 program has contacted me asking me to release step scores which I did not. I'm counting down the days to the last rank list day. I then figure to be homefree except for passing the stupid test.
I signed up to take it April 18, so hopefully the results will be back in time. Supposedly, they will be opening more spots for people in our situation soon.
I've also tried to figure out why I failed the data gathering. I went into the test having not done a regular patient visit in 4 months, so the first two were a little rusty for asking all the questions. Then once I got in the groove, I acted like the patients were real true life encounters. I focused on the complaint at hand did the pertinent pe, came out wrote up my note and generally was done with 5 or more minutes to spare. I did not read any books beforehand. I like what others have said here about playing the game. Next time I am going to ask, ask, ask...so the SP can check off all of their little boxes. I'm going to read the books and memorize the "scripted responses" expected for each challenge question. I thought this would be an appropriate test that would accurately assess a true clinical examination. How stupid of me. It clearly is another example of playing the game.
I hope I can pursue ligation against the NBME and USMLE. Two points seem to be worth pursuit. The delay in score reports causing me to receive them when programs were compiling rank lists. The fact that they would have received them the same day my dean did would have certainly affected my ranking. I'm applying for radiology where there are so many good applicants. You can't tell me a program wouldn't see this failing as a reason to move me down the list when all other comparisons with another candidate were pretty equal. That has definite effects on my future career and I feel would provide merit for litigation. Second, the delay may prevent me from passing before starting July 1. Third, and surely a weaker argument is that I think the test didn't accurately test my clinical skills.
Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.
