With almost 400 signatures in just 3 days, I'm glad to know my concerns about a virtual Step 2CS are felt by many others. Thank you so much for your support, and please consider sharing the link to the petition with others.
The following has been added to our petition, after discussion with several fellow medical students. This additional argument for why a virtual Step 2 CS will not be helpful for students or residency programs focuses on the complete loss of evaluating physical exam techniques or in-person communication skill set.
Thank you all,
Kelsey
Below is the recent addition:
Previously, students were expected to conduct appropriate physical exams for standardized patients based on the patient's concerns and history. With a "virtual" version of the exam, there is clearly no way to evaluate a student's physical exam techniques. Additionally, virtual exam will give no indication of a student's skills or style with regards to face-to-face interactions with patients. A virtual exam is essentially testing an entirely separate set of communication skills particular to telehealth encounters. While this skill set is arguably vital for future physicians to learn given the growth of telehealth, most students have not had any training whatsoever in this area. Yet NBME is willing to administer a brand new exam, required of all students, testing a skill set that none of us have learned or practiced. Ultimately this means students' performances will either be A) below par, thus providing a falsely low pass rate, or B) underwhelming but excused due to the newness of the exam and technical issues, thus providing a meaningless pass.
We highlight this, not to indicate a preference for an in-person exam, as we strongly believe Step 2 CS provides minimal value in either format, but rather to highlight that the change prevents NBME/USMLE from accomplishing their own goals when they created the exam.
From the USMLE website: "Step 2 CS uses standardized patients to test medical students and graduates on their ability to gather information from patients, perform physical examinations, and communicate their findings to patients and colleagues."
If many students, schools, and residency programs already felt the exam added little value to an application, then moving to a virtual format will only reduce any of that value by completely eliminating a physical exam and preventing genuine in-person interactions. Thus, realizing the exam's limited added value in its prior format, and given the extreme circumstances preventing in-person exams to be conducted, we believe this provides the opportune moment for NBME to, at least temporarily, end the administration of Step 2 CS.