Taking the USMLE to Task

Tags: Health

04/01/2019 Michel Accad, MD Anish Koka

Should a pass-fail exam designed to determine a student’s competence to practice medicine be scored numerically and used for residency selection? Every year, thousands of students sink an increasingly large number of hours and dollars to prepare for “Step 1” of the US Medical Licensing Examination, a task which seems to be disproportionate to the relevance the test bears to the practice of medicine.

Our guest on this show is Bryan Carmody, MD, (on twitter) a pediatric nephrologist who practices at the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughter in Norfolk, VA, and teaches medical students at the Eastern Virginia Medical School. Bryan himself has recently spent countless hours studying and blogging about the machinations that constitute licensing examination in the United States.

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