fmCASES Final Exam FAQ

No, you do not need to require students to complete all of fmCASES to use this exam. You could require a subset of the 40 cases in the fmCASES collection, and still use the 100-item exam.

The exam is based directly on the Family Medicine Clerkship Curriculum, which details common and important presentations that all medical students should experience during their third year family medicine clerkship.

We do not currently provide customized exams.

We recognize that family medicine clerkships differ. Some clerkships are longitudinal, and not in block format. Those that occur in blocks have varying duration, typically from four to eight weeks. Some clerkships include prenatal care, delivery, and neonatal care; and many do not. Some schools have coverage of the pediatric or internal medicine cases included in the fmCASES portfolio during other clerkships.

We are actively working with Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) leaders to implement innovative solutions, which will provide more customization. But these innovations will not be available immediately.

In the meantime, we do provide our entire exam bank, with over 360 items, free to all subscribers, and you can use this bank to customize an exam for your institution.

We welcome your feedback at examscoring@i-intime.org.

For the 100-item exam, we provide an annual report of exam performance, including mean, median, and standard deviation of student performance from all schools that take advantage of the scoring service.

The fmCASES 100-item exam is created by STFM leaders as an assessment tool based specifically on the Family Medicine Clerkship Curriculum, as covered by the 40 cases in the fmCASES collection. It cannot be compared with other assessment tools designed to test a different knowledge base. It can be used on its own or in conjunction with other assessment tools.

The fmCASES exam items have been extensively reviewed by a national committee and vetted via a rigorous validation process.

We are working on creating an online exam and would value your feedback so we can best meet your needs.

We provide the 100-item exam or the exam bank in a word document, which you can use to create your exam via Blackboard or Moodle. Programs like Respondus™ can help translate and upload documents into a Learning Management System’s question format.

Your fmCASES subscription includes five CLIPP (pediatric) cases and two SIMPLE (internal medicine) cases. The exam includes validated questions based on material from these cases.

Ninety of the items on the 100-item exam have passed our rigorous validation process. The exam also contains ten ‘test’ items, currently undergoing validation, which are randomly inserted. We do not include performance on these items as part of the student grade. We use this information to replenish the fmCASES exam bank with valid questions.

We recommend allotting three hours for exam completion. In our 2010-11 validation, 79% of students felt that three hours was the appropriate time allocation for completion of this exam.

If you use our scoring service, you won’t have to spend your valuable time scoring exams.

You will be able to directly compare how your students performed on this exam with the mean, median, and standard deviation of student performance from all the schools that are using the exam.

This will allow you to use national (as opposed to local) reference points to determine failing and honors level performance scores.

You will also receive four statistics reports after each exam administration, which will detail individual student performance, the distribution of student performance, the raw sores, and the validity statistics for each question.

If you choose to use the fmCASES scoring service, there is an annual $250 fee, which merely covers our overhead for processing the exam scores.

Other costs for exam scoring include:

• Bubble sheets: To help you get started, the first year you use our scoring service, we will provide you with a package of 500 bubble sheets. Your institution is responsible for these once this supply runs out. (These cost about $42 per 500 sheets).
• Shipping: Your institution is responsible for the cost of sending the bubble sheets to us for scoring. You may use whichever shipping method works best for you.

To request the exam, e-mail examscoring@i-intime.org.

Once the request has been successfully processed, you will receive an e-mail containing examination materials and instructions. The first time you use our scoring service, to help you get started, we will also supply you with a shipment of 500 bubble sheets.

Once your students have completed each exam administration, mail the bubble sheets to us. We will promptly score the exam and e-mail you the results in four statistics reports, which will detail individual student performance, the distribution of student performance, the raw sores, and the validity statistics for each question.

Questions in the fmCASES Final Exam Question Bank are based directly on the teaching points and learning objectives of fmCASES.  The 360 questions were written and extensively reviewed by a select and trained group of Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) members.  Throughout the 2010-11 academic year, these questions underwent rigorous validation at eight US medical schools.  This year, we will validate a 90-item exam and we will continue to validate items to replenish our item bank, available to all fmCASES subscribers.