Posted:  January 31, 2024

For more than 30 years, the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) has helped to ensure that physicians licensed to practice medicine in the United States have the knowledge and clinical skills necessary to care for patients safely and effectively. Consequently, ensuring the integrity and validity of the USMLE is paramount. Examinees who take the USMLE agree to uphold the integrity of the testing process, and security measures are in place to detect exam practices or performances that may raise questions of score validity.  
 
The USMLE program regularly monitors and analyzes examinees’ test performances for unusual score patterns or variations, and other information that could raise questions about the validity of an examinee’s results. As part of an ongoing investigation, the USMLE program has identified a pattern of anomalous exam performance associated with Nepal, which challenges the validity of test results for a group of examinees. Highly irregular patterns can be indicative of prior unauthorized access to secure exam content. Examinees with results in question are being notified by the USMLE Secretariat’s Office that their previous Step scores have been invalidated and that they will be required to take a validation exam(s). The USMLE program is working to notify examinees who need to schedule validation exam(s) and to support score users and other stakeholders impacted by the validation exam requirements.