OITE 2009 And Ninja Moderation

I understand that there are people everywhere who will try to beat "the system." whether it is hacking a program for the answers or just cheating on a test, this will happen. as a physician, regardless of specialty, you are held to a higher standard by your colleagues and the public. i would expect that people would respect themselves and their specialty enough to be honest in their own examination of where they are in their training. this is not a board examination.

posting this problem on the examination and that it can be hacked in itself is not a problem; but, because this was place on an open forum, it may greatly effect those who have honestly taken the exam. the consequences of this actions may effect many more people than necessary. the flaw could have easily been addressed but not publicly and not prior to others taking the exam.

i also thought that the exam was not to be taken early by any residencies. so how did someone obtain the disc prior to anyone taking the examination?

In reality, it's really hard to imagine that more than a handful of people truly cheated but the thing is, but it's equally hard to imagine that nobody did. And it's impossible to prove who those people were.

Ultimately this means that the exam is probably reasonable in terms of how you score against everyone else (if you know obviously that you didn't cheat and the actual mean is probably not going to be affected much given the vast majority of non-cheaters), but it makes it impossible to compare one individual against another because you could never know if they both took the test honestly.

I truly hope that no person had access to the answers ahead of submission and this post is about people who figured out how to unlock the disc prior to the official release. If you do cheat on the OITE it will only hurt you in terms of the actual boards.

That said...... When do we get the results of our actual exam and a copy of our own answers (as I can not open the file saved to my USB drive). It is XML format and does not open on my computer.

[It is quite unfair that for me (a PGY 3) who worked her butt off all year, who did not do well as expected (no one in my program did) and then people cheat, carry up the mean centiles and people's grades suffer the consequences. In my program it is absolutely frowned upon when you drop below the 30th centile. With some residents potentially not being promoted.

This is a little off topic but...
I could not agree with you more. I am at a similar program where the OITE is used as one criterion for making you remediate a year if you dont do above the 30th percentile. This is a punitive means of utilizing a learning tool (which is what the OITE really is). You may have a bad test day, or were on call the night before and you screwed up. Big deal. I know plenty of attendings who didnt do well on the OITE but then rocked the boards. The notion of being demoted or even fired based on an OITE score is unthinkable, especially if you are a good resident and a hard worker. Unfortunatly many program directors look at the OITE as THE only objective measure of you knowledge base despite the fact that the questions suck and some of the references contradict the "preferred" answer.

MM

Personally, I question the integrity of the program whose residents "figured out" this lack of security before test was administered. As Staff said earlier, no discs were to be handed prior to the day of the exam, nor were they to be used by the support staff. At my program, the coordinator personally supervised us while pre-loading the software, where we both opened the plastic together, installed the software, ejected the disk and it was placed in her custody until the day of the exam. Now here is where some "foul play" could possibly occur, if the residents were not supervised during the pre-loading, or if the coordinator allowed the residents to keep the discs, neither of which should've happened per AAOS guidelines.

If everything was done according to the instructions provided then the only time a resident would've been able to go "exploring" on the disc was when they received it on the day of the exam. Again, if this was allowed to happen, then the integrity of the whole program is in question. Why didn't someone say anything when there was a resident exploring the disc instead of taking the exam?

So I think you can legitimately question the character of the entire program of the resident who "hacked" the system...

AS