this will harb students definite negligence some Med students just got hosed by the NB that's the osteopathic version of the nbme the national board of osteopathic medical examiners and they're the ones who are in control of the match process applying to residency as a medical student now here's a screenshot from an email from the NB to a student who was affected it's essentially those who were using residency Cass which is one of the three main residency application Services you have ESS SF match and residency Cass eras is the main one that most of you are
going to be familiar with residency Cass is the newest out of the three and it's oby students that have been using that this application cycle it says Dear student on October 7th 2024 the nbome was made aware of a technical issue that impacted the delivery of your complex USA level one performance results to programs using residency cast for residency applications complex level one is the equivalent for do students of usml Step 1 which of course is now past fail both USM Step 1 and Lex level one are now pass fail this issue resulted in NB
reporting to residency cast of a level one three-digit score in addition to a pass or fail result God ah this is just sloppy man NB does not report three-digit scores for level one but a score was transmitted by NB to residency cast in error and was available to program directors until this week your performance results are being updated and the official pass or fail result will be reflected in your residency cast profile to program directors we deeply apologize for this error and have rectified the reporting and our systems we have reached out to oby program
directors informing them of this error on part of our NB reporting and advise them that conx USA level 1 examination results reported as pass or fail are the only official reports of level one results any prior information including three-digit scores regarding level one examinations taken after May 1st 2022 should not be utilized in any decisions on interviewing or matching candidates rest assured the holistic review algorithm used does not include comx level one scores yikes okay so why is this a big deal if you're studying for a pass fail exam as a medical student you just
want to pass there is no well I shouldn't say there's no there is little added utility for trying to do as well as possible back when level one and step one were numerically graded then of course you want to get the highest score possible because that made you a more competitive candidate now level two and step two are the new step one a lot of emphasis and importance is placed on those scores which comes after your third year of medical school and of course pressure is far reduced on level one and step one so what
ultimately happens here there's going to be a lot of variation in the scores because passing is a pretty low bar many students aren't going to want to overstudy and pass by a massive margin because that's added time and effort that may not have you know the best utility being used there they may want to spend more of that time and energy on Research as an example because research is going to really improve your residency competitiveness versus passing by a larger margin because again the residency programs should just see a pass or fail and by the
way if you need help with your research we have the ultimate Premed and medical student research course linked below so what the NB is saying here is hey guys we weren't supposed to send these scores oops our bad and don't worry part of the holistic review algorithm it doesn't include level one score so you're totally fine it's like it's chill it's good guys well the issue is that if a Residency program director looks at two identical candidates one has a much higher complex level one numeric score one has a much lower one they both pass
but one's High one's low they're going to see the higher scoring student as more appealing more competitive because hey this student scored so much better that probably means they're also going to be scoring better on the yearly inservice it's going to be overall better for our program we're going to seem far more competitive having these better or higher scoring candidates match at our program and there are Downstream effects to that that they care about but that's pretty F because again when these students took comx level one they were expecting it to be past field they
weren't expecting their score numeric score would ever be seen or ever matter I love this top comment they should at least tell us the three-digit score so we know what the program saw which yeah I think that's totally reasonable class action otherwise I don't know if there's any recourse this is of course super super fued I mean let's see how this unfolds I think a class action or any lawsuit is a pipe gam You' probably have to get some candidates who fail to match and get a PD program director willing to testify that they rank
them low specifically and solely because of that score otherwise I think you're going to have a tough time selling this to a jury even then I'm skeptical I think the average juror is going to hear this case and think so some doctors are mad they did bad on a test I don't want a doctor who did bad on a test and tune everything else out yeah so you you have to prove that damages were done and then the question becomes how easy or difficult is that going to be because if you can't prove damages were
done there's no class action lawsuit this is completely unacceptable they're probably going to get away with it too because most met students aren't going to risk publicly suing the NB and aren't financially able to anyway unless someone doesn't match and then has nothing to lose and sues them considering how stressful and important the match process is for Med students this is this is pretty bad definite negligence in the email Greta gross do Executive Vice President for assessment and chief assessment officer at nbome apologized for the error and said the board has reached out to obig
guy program directors to alert them to the error and advise them not to consider anything but the past fail result which you can do of course but if a program director has more data are you sure that all of them aren't going to take advantage of the additional data to then influence how they may rank candidate and keep in mind you may actually get some oby program directors to speak out about this and say oh yeah of course we're not going to factor this in because there's a penalty to say anything else publicly so there
may be others who will Factor this in right and they just don't want to say it because by speaking out about that that Residency program is going to get the Reddit store form and hate and negative reputation and things that come with that so just keep that in mind you may have program directors saying that hey we're not going to factor this in but first of all you're not hearing from every single program director and also they have the incentive to say that we were told there was no way to access our three-digit scores even
for our own knowledge yet here they are storing that data and releasing it without our consent they said very good point still quite strange to me that they've never provided it to the students I believe they give you a like a relative qualitative kind of where you scored in relation to others but not a numeric score more scallions which is a ready user also noted that do applicants are already at a disadvantage because most programs do not universally accept comlex level two scores and highly recommend USMLE step two scores in their view this mishap is
another dock to do applicants since their three-digit score was visible to program directors for an entire week while MD applicants were marked past fail as designed to mitigate some of the harm they said that NB should release our three-digit scores so we know what program Direct saw and refund our score release fee I think that's actually a very reasonable suggestion to release the score so that students can see it and then also refund them on the score release fee I think that's totally reasonable yeah Harris Ahmed here echoing the point I was making earlier in
this video Brian carodi MD aka the sheriff of sodium an amazing outspoken voice in this area he pointed out that a lot of program directors don't know how to interpret commac scores since they're different than USM scores furthermore do applicants should be compared against other do applicants not to MD applicants par anoxically I think the NB score leak mostly hurts do applicants applying to do friendly programs carodi wrote If a programmed director who's used to evaluating and stratifying do applicants sees the secret comx level one score especially if that score is very low they may
not be able to unsee it now Brian has a great thread here on X explaining the situation and what it means for applicants and when you ask how much this will impact applicants he says that for most applicants and most programs I think the answer is not very much now his first point is that a lot of PDs aren't used to interpreting comlex scores they're used to the USM scores and he argues I think very rightfully so that the NB should just use a scale score on the same 300 points as the USMLE but also
keep in mind that I've spoken with several dos both students and graduates and when talking about comlex versus USMLE they all pretty much agree that comlex is a much how do I say this it's just not nearly as good of a test as us MLA Brian then goes on to say that even if you know how to interpret these scores comx scores help you compare d to do candidates and again I think a big part of that is you can't really compare a complex to a USM score because the tests are more different than you
might expect and just because someone scores an 80th percentile complex doesn't mean they're scoring 80th percentile us ML and that's why so many do students choose to take USM even though it's not technically required for them right Brian even states that complex level one and USM step one scores are positively correlated but still a lot of variability as you can see right here and third any PD who wants to use the secret LEL level one score knows that when the examine took the test they were expecting it to be pass fail a lower score could
reflect a lower performer running at their top speed or an average or even high performer at half speed due to the incentives at Play Again expecting it to be pass fail and this is the Crux of it this is why I think this will harm students if a PD who's used to evaluating and stratifying do applicants sees the secret comlex level one score especially if that score is very low they may not be able to unsee it what do you think let me know with the comment down below
