Revisiting Retake Policy: Analyzing the Success Rates of Examinees With Multiple Attempts on the United States Medical Licensing Examination.

Purpose: A testing program's decision making on retake policy considers a number of factors, including fairness to examinees, examination security, examination purpose, and classification accuracy. For high-stakes licensure and certification examinations charged with protection of the public, this includes balancing fairness issues inherent in the potential for false negatives with the public protection need to minimize false positives. Since 2012, the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) has maintained a policy of ≤ 6 attempts on any examination component.

Differential Item Functioning Analysis of United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 Items.

Purpose: Previous studies have examined and identified demographic group score differences on United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step examinations. It is necessary to explore potential etiologies of such differences to ensure fairness of examination use. Although score differences are largely explained by preceding academic variables, one potential concern is that item-level bias may be associated with remaining group score differences.

Examining Demographics, Prior Academic Performance, and United States Medical Licensing Examination Scores.

Purpose: To examine whether demographic differences exist in United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) scores and the extent to which any differences are explained by students' prior academic achievement.

Method: The authors completed hierarchical linear modeling of data for U.S.