Changes to Step 3 CCS Grade Reporting
In our previous posts, the CCS Reporting gave you a performance report independent of your multiple choice performance. Meaning, you will receive feedback on how you did the CCS Grading report with a confidence interval in the “Lower Performance” “Borderline Performance” and “Higher performance.” The USMLE has changed the way your CCS performance is reported. Now instead of giving you an independent performance on how you did on the CCS portion of the test, it will tell you how you did compared to how you did on the multiple choice portion of the test. Therefore, if you did poorly on the multiple choice portion of the test, and you did poorly on the CCS portion of the test, your results would show that your CCS case performance was the “Same” “Relative to your Overall Step 3 Performance.” Your report would look something like this:
This makes it much more difficult to determine how you did on just the CCS Portion of the test, and you will have to make a lot of assumptions based on how you did on the multiple choice portion of the test. In our opinion, this is unfortunate because this is much less helpful in determining one’s performance on the CCS Cases because it does not tell you how you did independent of the multiple choice part of Step 3. We feel that the prior reporting was much more helpful, but this is the way it is now, so we have to get used to the new CCS reporting now.
It’s important to be prepared for the CCS portion of the test, so we recommend that you practice case after case after case so that you will become a master at the CCS portion which is a large percentage of your grade.
You can try our program out free by downloading it here.