How Exams Are Scored
The AAMC collaborates with medical school representatives to develop the scoring key for the PREview exam (i.e., the key effectiveness rating for each response). These medical school representatives include admissions officers, faculty, student affairs representatives, and others who work closely with medical students and understand the expectations and professional standards of medical students.
Your PREview exam score is based on the extent to which the effectiveness ratings of your responses (items) align with medical educators’ consensus ratings. Full credit is awarded for an item if your rating matches a consensus of medical educators’ ratings. Half credit is awarded if your rating is one rating away from the medical educators’ consensus rating but still on the same side of the scale (i.e., Effective/Very Effective responses or Ineffective/Very Ineffective responses).
For example, if an item is keyed “Effective” and you rate it “Very Effective,” you receive half credit. If you rate the same item “Ineffective,” you do not receive credit as the item key is on the opposite side of the scale.
Higher scores mean that your ratings align more closely with medical educators' consensus ratings, whereas lower scores mean your ratings align less closely.
Why Your Raw Score is Converted to a Scaled Score
Every test form of the AAMC PREview exam measures your understanding of effective professional behaviors. However, each form is different in the specific items it presents. While care is taken to ensure each form is about equivalent in difficulty, one form may be slightly more or less difficult than another.
The conversion of raw scores to scaled scores, through a process called equating, compensates for small variations in difficulty between sets of items. This conversion minimizes variability in the meaning of test scores across different forms, a score of 6, for example, has the same meaning regardless of when you take the exam and regardless of which form you receive.