Presented By: Samantha Redden, Baylor College of Medicine
Co-Authors: Ricardo Bello, Medical College of Wisconsin
Rana Higgins, Medical College of Wisconsin
Purpose
Few objective criteria are available to applicants to compare one program against another. One source of objective and readily available information is the American Board of Surgery's (ABS) report on General Surgery Residency Pass Rates. This report aggregates passing rates among first-time takers of the Qualifying Exam (QE) and Certifying Exam (CE) for each program over the last three years and is publicly available through the ABS website. The ABS website states the report is "meant for the use of general surgery residency programs and for medical students who are interested in surgical residencies." However, its usefulness in comparing surgical residencies has not been previously evaluated.
Methods
We extracted passing rates for the QE and CE for each program from the most recent years (2019-2021) available on the American Board of Surgery website. We used Stata v18.0 (StataCorp LLC, College Station, TX) to calculate the 95% confidence intervals around passing rates for each program using the standard, normal distribution-based Wald intervals.
Results
All 248 programs with available data were included. The lowest pass rate for a program for the QE was 60%, and its corresponding 95% confidence interval (17% to 100%) overlapped with all other 248 programs in the United States (Figure 1). The lowest pass rate for the ABS CE was 38%, and its corresponding 95% confidence interval (4% to 71%) overlapped with 42% of the programs. Among programs with 100% pass rates for the QE or the CE, only those with more than 16 test takers over the three years in the report had confidence intervals narrower than 10%.
Conclusion
Inferences are being made about program performance, the usefulness of these rates in discriminating among programs is very limited. This is especially true for smaller programs, for which there is logically greater imprecision around pass rates