Originally posted by 12R34Y
the above poster is correct.....NOBODY knows the answer to that.......NOBODY.
Our micro professor told us last semester when we took the NBME shelf exam that he had know idea how to interpret the raw score and how to correlate it to the national percentile etc....
he said over and over to our class that it is a "super secret" thing with NBME and no one knows how many "test" questions there actually are etc....
theories are always interesting about how people think it is graded.
later
True enough, no one except the NBME, knows how the darn thing is scored, though theories abound. There is a conventional wisdom, however, and it goes something like this. If yours differs from mine, please fill me in.
- passing is usually estimated to be around 55-65%, this is from Kaplan, the designer's of Q-bank
- questions are apparently "randomly" selected within categories from a huge database from which there are many variants
-some of these are experimental and/or total duds (Kaplan estimates around 50), which leaves 300 questions
- current consensus seems to be that adaptive testing is not in place (increasing difficulty if you do well, easy if you do poorly), although you hear the occasional person that suspects otherwise
-whether linear scoring (1 question 1 point) is used is open to debate, and, frankly, with NBME's secrecy is unknown; some people suspect there may be a non-linear algorithm used because some folks who got high scores in most domains but bombed 1 or 2 random categores sunk their scores big time
