sdn usmle step 2 practice questions calculator

And I guess that’s a good point, as far as it goes.īut what’s more interesting is the dataset they used to make this point. The paper is written by psychometricians with the goal of addressing something completely different: how many incorrect answer choices should be included with multiple choice questions? Their point is that, on an exam where most questions are answered correctly, an answer choice that is chosen by <5% of test-takers may still serve a useful role as a distractor. The key piece of information to help us translate percentages to USMLE three-digit scores comes from this paper:Ī paper written by NBME authors contains data that helps us convert percentages of items answered correctly to USMLE three-digit scores. After all, the USMLE does not provide precise details on how they calculate the three digit score.īut lately, I happened upon a piece of data that helps shed some light on this issue for a related exam.

In discussing this, I was pretty honest that some of my calculations were based on assumptions and guesswork.

I hypothesized that passing USMLE Step 1 probably required answering around 65% of questions correctly – which suggested that each correctly-answered question thereafter was worth around 1 point. Back in 2019, as part of my quest to convince whoever will listen that USMLE scores aren’t as useful for residency selection as we act like they are, I wrote about how many points each USMLE Step 1 question is worth.

Sdn usmle step 2 practice questions calculator