The certification examination in emergency medicine: an update.

The 1977 field test and first administration of the American Board of Emergency Medicine certification examination produced data which support the assumption upon which it was originally developed. A total of 22 fourth-year medical students, 36 emergency medicine residents, and 36 emergency physicians participated in the field test held in Lansing, Michigan. The examination was found to be highly reliable, to distribute scores among groups according to presumed competence, and to support the concept of treating the examination as a total instrument rather than one subdivided by content areas. Patient management problems were found to be inefficient as a test format. The first administration of the examination, which tested 616 candidates, confirmed the original field test findings.