CME examinations: one year of experience.

Since its inception, the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology (JAAD) has provided physicians with an opportunity to earn Category I CME credit by completing an examination on CME articles that appear in the Journal. Since July, 1979, an average of 748 physicians per month have participated in this program. The Academy office has developed a computer analysis program for each of these examinations. This analysis includes: (1) item analysis, (2) difficulty and discrimination indices, (3) descriptive statistics, (4) reliability coefficient, (5) raw score distribution, and (6) percentile distribution. This article provides a detailed description of the above statistical treatments along with an analysis of CME examination performance during the first year of publication (July, 1979-June, 1980).