Yah-E said:
Sup peeps:
Writing to inquire about what is the score scale for USMLE Step 1? What standard score is:
passing?
respectable?
around 90 percentile?
highest possible?
What is 254/98 mean?
Thanks a bunch!
People in "Step 1 mode" will be able to give you better details. Last I heard, passing is set at 182/75. The XXX/YY is the Step 1 score. The three-digit score is what most people talk about when they ask you for your Step 1 score. The two-digit score is derived by the NBME to correspond to the 3-digit score. Obviously, the 2-digit maxes out at 99, so there's a point at a certain score where the 2-digit stays at 99 and the 3-digit keeps increasing. The 2-digit is probably important because it is adjusted so that 75 is always the cut-off for passing.
No one knows exactly how the 3-digit score is derived. There's a theory that 300 is the maximum score. It goes that 50 questions of the 350 question test do not count. They are thrown out and the 3 digit score is the absolute number of the remaining 300 that are correctly answered. There's nothing to prove this claim, but it makes pretty good sense.
"Respectable" depends on your personal goals and the field you plan on entering. "Respectable" mean any of the following: just passing, >200, greater than the mean, greater than one standard deviation above the mean, >240. It's all relative. People usually study with one of 3 goals in mind, as outlined in First Aid: (1) just pass, (2) beat the mean, (3) >240. 240 is kind of the "magic number" for competitive residencies for whatever reason, and everything above that doesn't seem to be as important. i.e. There seems to be more subjective difference between a score of 237 and 242 than between a score of 245 and 250.
You can do the math to figure out the 90th percentile from the most recent report of the mean and standard deviation. I don't have that info for this year's tests and I can't remember what it was last year when I took it.
