Why is the COMLEX pass rate so variable year-to-year??

[deleted1129181]

It's all over the place. Case in point - pass rate shot up from 87.5% in 2011 to 98.1% the year after. At first I expected pass rates to take a dip in the 2016-2020 years due to the high influx of new schools with average MCAT scores below 500. But the numbers show that the opposite happened - 2018 exam takers were at a 95.9% pass rate, which is one of the highest. Seriously, is this thing rigged? Or perhaps high achieving MD rejects (don't get upset, I'm one of them) who go to well established DO schools are balancing out COMLEX failures from new DO schools?

Any thoughts @Goro @Angus Avagadro

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[Goro]

I talked to you about Nationwide or individual schools?

Nationwide there was a change in the scoring parameters three maybe four years ago? I don't remember exactly when.

Schools can change because individual classes are just like your siblings or your best friends everyone's different. This is due to who gets admitted to who gets hired on to the faculty to what new curricular changes are made.

We've made about three significant curricular changes in my time as a faculty member. Enter scores did decline significantly the year immediately after we changed two of them. Then we got used to said changes, and scores started creeping back upwards.

Oh, one more thing that can make a huge difference oh, and that is who is a course coordinator

 

[Osminog]

The pass-fail rate is not standardized from year to year. Setting minimum standards for passing is both an art and a science; it involves taking into account the opinions of various subject matter experts, as well as social/political/educational considerations. There are many confounding factors that can skew this process. For example, a panelist might think that a question is easy and that 90% of minimally competent test-takers should answer it correctly based on the content it covers—but if the question is written very poorly (as many COMLEX questions are), then that might lower the question’s content validity and render the panelist’s “90%” assessment useless. There are ways to look for these confounding variables when analyzing exam data, and attempts can be made to correct for them.

At their core, the COMLEX exams are trash. They’re written poorly, and they overemphasize pseudoscientific topics that have little to do with medicine. No amount of number-crunching and data analysis, even when conducted by highly qualified psychometricians, can turn a pile of poo into gold.

 

[Ho0v-man]

It’s mostly bc students have caught on that using board review resources and not relying on their curriculum makes things easier.

Pass rate would likely be higher if it wasn’t for the new schools. Not necessarily because these students are so terrible like the common belief on SDN seems to be. Rather, these schools are inherently disorganized and seem to always do things to get in their students way like mandatory attendance or forcing people to participate in a board review course of dubious quality, etc.

 

[dabagi]

I agree. It is hard to guess whether you passed or failed at the end of the test day.

And the wait to know whether you passed or failed is very painful