Now, we get to my tips and final thoughts. My final advice as you get started is to just start with your assignment or start with a concept, diagnosis, management area of dermatology. Think about something clinically relevant to write a test question on a topic that you think is important to identify. Think of something about that topic that is clinically relevant. Review the literature that corroborates with your question's answer. Don't write a whole question with an answer you think is right before you confirm that yes, indeed, I have a resource that corroborates what I believe the answer to be. Find a good clinical photo. If you are testing a scenario where exam findings are helpful and you're going to need the patient's permission to use these things for educational purposes, which can include testing, so go ahead and get all those consents at the time you're taking the photos. Think of how this concept can be written in a clinically relevant way. Next, write your stem and before you get too deeply into things, re-read it and edit your stem for brevity. Eliminate the superfluous and avoid the red herrings. We're not taking the test for you to teach me something. We're not taking the test for me to learn all about this patient's marital discord or whatever or what his mom thinks or his grandma thinks or whatever. We're here to test. Do I know this information? Do not take them down any rabbit holes. Review any evidence that your distractors are invalid or will trigger challenge. If so, replace them or edit them so that they're more hardy to criticism. Ask yourself, did I offer five plausible choices that I think someone might select? Can high performers answer my question by covering up the answers and not reading the answer choices? Can I just read the stem and answer the question? Is my photo in focus with natural skin tones, good lighting, no distractions in the photo? Is the material that I'm testing subject to change in the foreseeable future? Is it too new? Is it controversial? You want to test things that are solid because you don't want to be throwing out a bunch of new test questions on appeal or on internal audits of truth and justice in the American way. So that's my advice as you get started. I hope you've enjoyed this. I have some resources here, some very good item writing tutorials from the American Board of Dermatology, an excellent free online National Board of Examiner, National Board of Medical Examiner item writing guide, which was last updated in 2020. It's an excellent, excellent guide, and then some other resources as well. I hope you've enjoyed this American Academy of Dermatology test writing workshop, and I would love to answer your questions as they come up. Happy test writing, everybody.

test questions

dermatology

clinically relevant topic

patient consent

clear and concise stems