Thousands of medical students are banding together and petitioning to eliminate the Step 2 Clinical Skills test, a supplement added to the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam in 2004 to evaluate patient care skills, which the petitioners argue is too expensive and unsupported by clinical data.
"We all believe there needs to be accountability for competencies among medical students," Lydia Flier, a Boston-based Harvard Medical School student involved with the petition, told STAT. "But we do not think that [this exam] is a cost-effective, fair or reasonable way to do that."
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While the vast majority of U.S. medical students pass the test on their first go, the students rallying to end the exam point out that annually, students spend $36 million in exam fees and travel expenses to the five cities where the test is offered. Additionally, they contend that the 11 years worth of data collection done on the effects of the test have produced no causal link between medical students taking the Step 2 CS test and improved patient outcomes. They argue the same skills could be much more meaningfully evaluated by individual medical schools, which already conduct their own clinical evaluations in many instances.
"Currently, it costs over $1 million to catch a single student who fails the Step 2 CS on back-to-back attempts," the petitioners wrote on their website. "Step 2 CS adds no provable benefit to U.S. medical education or patient safety at an enormous cost. The exam should not be required for licensing of US medical school graduates."