NBME Evolves Assessment Portfolio to Support Medical Student Learning

NBME, a mission-driven organization that specializes in the creation of high-quality assessments and education tools for health professionals, is evolving its portfolio to enhance medical student learning. From customizable to standardized examinations, NBME’s Assess and Learn Portfolio has expanded to provide flexible resources that capture a more holistic viewpoint of learning progress across the medical educational journey. This expansion includes:

• Customized Assessment Services (CAS), which allows medical educators to create an exam tailored to their unique curriculum needs, now includes a Practice option for the administration of lower-stakes, non-proctored assessments.
• The new INSIGHTS^SM learner dashboard, introduced in June 2023 with results from NBME^® Self-Assessments, now also contains results from NBME Subject Examinations and will integrate results from CAS over the next several months.

“We heard from those who value NBME’s summative and standardized tests that they want additional options for lower-stakes and more frequent assessments that they can embed within courses,” Renee Gagliardi, NBME Vice President of Product Management, said. “We’ve received requests for richer and more comprehensive pictures of each student’s outcomes than what single-instance score reports provide, and the CAS Practice option and INSIGHTS help meet that need. NBME is also engaging with medical educators and students to help ensure our assessments meet both learning and licensure readiness.”

The new CAS Practice option provides immediate performance feedback at the end of each exam to facilitate educator review with groups or individual students. It also allows for flexible online administration windows that eliminate the need for faculty to reserve rooms or proctors. Through the use of practice and proctored exams, educators can design a program to monitor growth and target remediation strategies.

INSIGHTS, an interactive learner dashboard, provides medical students with direct access to their results from their NBME Self-Assessments and Subject Exams at no additional cost. NBME Self-Assessments can help learners track their progress and evaluate readiness for the United States Medical Licensing Examination^® (USMLE^®) and NBME Clinical Science Subject Exams. Subject Exams are convenient, pre-built assessments to assess student knowledge at the end of a course or clerkship and to benchmark a cohort against examinees around the United States.

Results in INSIGHTS allow learners to delve deeper into content areas for improvement and track their longitudinal performance more easily than they could using multiple individual score reports. Additionally, the administrative burden for medical schools has been reduced through the direct release of score reports from Subject Exams to examinees. The planned inclusion of CAS results in INSIGHTS will give an extensive view of NBME assessment activity.

“Both the option for CAS Practice and INSIGHTS are designed to provide a clear picture of learners’ progress,” Jennifer Wise, NBME Senior Manager of Product Management, said. “CAS Practice option and INSIGHTS help educators guide students toward successful outcomes throughout their learning journey and give them information about how to better focus their studies.”

Medical students and educators are invited to explore the new services and see how they can enhance the learning experience and outcomes. To learn more about the CAS Practice option, visit NBME.org/cas-practice. For more information about INSIGHTS, visit NBME.org/educators/resources/insights.