CNN is airing an exclusive about doctors cheating on exams.

[Sheherezade]

I'm in agreement with the non-cheating opinion. This is a pet peeve with me at all levels. MAKE NEW QUESTIONS, you lazy ass test makers!!!!! We get this issue even at the high school level with teachers refusing to release any old material to their students so they don't " have the questions". Jeez. Studying is different from cheating. Cheating is memorizing a list of letters (The answers are B C B B A B...) without regard to the subject. Studying past material in order to learn the subject matter is STUDYING.

[MissCrabette]

I think there are two issues we're debating here. SHOULD this be considered cheating? I don't think so, but the reality is that by taking those tests, people agree to the terms imposed by the organizations administering them. When you violate those terms, THAT is considered cheating.

Then there's also the individual's character that's adding another layer to the whole story and making things more complicated than they should be. He may be scum, but his character has nothing to do with the truth, regardless of the fact that he flip-flopped on the issue.

[Tenacious_D]

I really think when CNN produces stuff like this it gives the general public a false perception about what is going on in the medical field. They forgot to also mention that folks have to go to undergrad for 4 years, med school 4 years, intern 1 year, residency 4 years AND fellowship for 1 year. Do I think it's cheating...not necessarily but I think if it explicitly states you can't share test questions than the schools shouldn't be a conduit for the information sharing. I wonder if this Weber guy would have blown the whistle had he passed the boards the first time...just saying.

[peggyfromwastate]

I'm in agreement with the non-cheating opinion. This is a pet peeve with me at all levels. MAKE NEW QUESTIONS, you lazy ass test makers!!!!! We get this issue even at the high school level with teachers refusing to release any old material to their students so they don't " have the questions". Jeez. Studying is different from cheating. Cheating is memorizing a list of letters (The answers are B C B B A B...) without regard to the subject. Studying past material in order to learn the subject matter is STUDYING.

Yes yes yes!!!!

[peggyfromwastate]

These guys are literally responsible to know the ins and outs of over 2000 pages of info on their subjects.

The questions are long on these tests- like a page of info, followed by one multiple choice question with highly detailed questions. No one is reproducing all that! And the test writers idea of New Questions may involve changing some numbers within the question-- not a new concept.

Dh is also sent formal study packets from a study program- that's the official study packet that the program pushes the residents to study. It's a similar format to the boards too.

Using recall of subjects covered in an exam is studying. No one has access to the entire question bank- and the questions are long and detailed. There are thousands of questions- and if a resident remembers 7 or so after taking an exam that really bugged him, and asked a colleague what they thought of that question-- cheating? Really?

[medpedspouse]

Just to give some information. I took a course offered by the NBME on test/question writing just so I could write better test questions for the clerkship mind you. That course taught me quite a bit about the enormous amount of time, resources, people, validation, etc. that it takes to create these national tests. I can now understand why the tests cost so much and why creating new test question takes so long.

[diggitydot]

Trying to get a better grade with little work and no understanding of the material = cheating

Trying to get a better grade with a shit ton of EXTRA work and an in depth understanding of the material = not cheating

[PrincessFiona]

If the test is an issue, then it should be addressed.

In my book, it is still cheating. This is different than the test banks for GRE, SAT, etc that are made available. Why? The radiologists do know that 50% of the test is composed of these old questions. That means that when they study from those questions and answers that they are basically studying the EXACT questions that will be asked. That is different from practicing analogies to strengthen your skills or reading passages that will never be on a test to practice finding the main point, etc.

When I was doing my post-bacc many years ago, I took a chemistry class that was ridiculous. The professor re-used tests that he cycled. He had four different exams and you could be sure that one of those exams would be used. He would turn the exams back so that you could see the grade on it and then would collect them all before people left so that no one could pass the tests on. People wrote questions/answers down in their notebooks though while he talked (stupid pre-meds!). There was also a test bank (stupid pre-meds!), and I found it morally wrong to use. I bombed every exam while a large percentage of the class got A's. I ended up retaking the course and I also shared the information about the exam bank with the professor (stupid Kris!). When I retook the course with him, he had tossed the old exams and started over with a new one. I went to his office every other day for help solving problems and I ended up with an A- that semester. My hardest grade ever earned in college...but the grades sure were different on exams because people couldn't cheat anymore.

It's one thing to have practice tests with questions that won't show up on an exam but that will help you to review information and learn how the exam will be. It is an entirely other thing to memorize certain questions on an exam to pass on to a test bank and then for other users to take those questions that will show up on an exam and memorize the answers. That isn't studying ... it is cheating.

Kris

[corn poffi]

Well said Kris, that's exactly how I feel. I wrote something similar last night, but deleted it because I felt that it didn't get my point across clearly. This is very much different from other question banks that consist of discarded questions that were given to them by the test writers.

[peggyfromwastate]

I don't know how the rads test works, but dh says that for ENT there are 100 new questions every year. There are 200 "recycled" questions. Of those, only 40 or so are graded. There are around 5000 questions in the test bank Basically studying test bank questions in ENT might help you with a very small number of questions, and the party line from dhs attendings has been that they don't condone test banks. Dh doesn't share questions, but he does write down what recollects after he takes the exam so that he can look up the answers. Then after he looks those up, he deletes it all and stores it in his brain.

The boards are all new questions- never seen before. The harder part if boards is definitely the oral boards-- and so...

If studying test bank questions exclusively gets you thru residency, it won't prepare you sufficiently for boards. You will fail. Especially for oral boards. But no one studies test bank questions exclusively.

I think of it as studying. But now that this "scandal" erupted it's going to lead to regulations and rules, and it's going to end up being a huge pain with very little "improvement" overall.

If the integrity of the BOARDS isn't in question- if this is just the practice tests, or the inservice exams, I can't see what the big deal is. This isn't THE licensing exam. This is just a tool that attendings use to compare the residents in their programs to other programs, and the tests point out what areas the students need to work on and improve.

???

[MissCrabette]

Alright, but how do you get around this?

I further understand that irregular behavior such as copying answers, sharing information, using notes, or otherwise giving or obtaining unauthorized information or aid—evidenced by observation, statistical analysis of answers, or otherwise—on any portion of the examination will be reported to the Board and will constitute grounds for the invalidation of my examination, and may lead to my being judged unacceptable for certification by the Board. I recognize that examination materials, examination questions, props for the oral examination, and questions on the oral examination are copyrighted as the sole property of the American Board of Radiology and must not be removed from the test area or reproduced, in whole or in part, and that any reproduction of copyrighted material is a federal offense.

[PrincessFiona]

By being drawkters?

[corn poffi]

Oh I definitely think CNN did a horrible job with this story. But what else is new? They love overgeneralizations. It's ridiculous.

I really don't think this will damage the reputation of radiologists as a whole. The 5 people who actually believe the idiotic "news" stories that CNN does already have tinfoil hats on. I have heard nothing of this story other than on this board. Plus, what is somebody going to do, request a radiologist not being involved in their care?

[MissCrabette]

You know, I realize that a board exam question bank has a ton more questions than a semester-long college course, and I see how people try to justify creating those question banks, but at the end of the day they're still in violation of the policies governing the exam and can get in deep doodoo for it.

What I want to know is if Kaplan and USMLE World use old (and therefore legal) questions or if they're also just as guilty as these residents.

ETA: I was unable to get this information from the USMLE World website. Hmm...

[spotty_dog]

I don't think that recalling the gist of a test question is a copyright infringement. For that, you'd have to reproduce it word for word in its entirety (or a large part). And I think that the first half of the paragraph is referring to behavior during the test -- it's saying that if you copy answers or bring a crib sheet in or whatever, they can get you whether they observe you doing it or analyze your test answers to see whom you copied or which questions you got right despite being dumber than a box of rocks on all the others.

So I don't think that the paragraph quoted condemns what the other posters have described, which I think is more like if I leave my Complex Analysis final and tell next year's students, "Dang, there was a contour integral that used a contour in the shape of Marilyn Monroe! I have never seen such an irregular contour, but I think it was a trick. The equation was f(x)=sin(x)/x-23 and the possible answers were 0, 1, and infinity so you should definitely brush up on your Cauchy theorem and figure out how the heck to figure out something like that to get one of those answers." That sure doesn't feel like cheating, just friendly assistance, so I sympathize with those who are saying it's simply intelligent studying. On the other hand, I'd like to think that my goal in taking the Complex Analysis course in the first place would be to learn what I could *during* the class. The exam would just be a way for me and the teacher to figure out what I've absorbed. So focusing my studying to get a good grade on the test, by honing in on the tricky concepts that I already know will be on there, does seem to defeat the purpose...

I just don't know.