The Medical School steps up.
When US Medical Licensing Exam testing sites closed abruptly due to COVID-19, The Warren Alpert Medical School stepped up to become the first regional testing site in the country.
By the time the testing period ended on June 30, nearly 500 medical students from around the region had taken their Step 1 and 2 exams at the site—the only one in New England.
The Medical School worked with the National Board of Medical Examiners and the Rhode Island Department of Health to safely open as a testing center, and with Facilities Management to ensure that rooms and high-touch surfaces were cleaned and disinfected daily. Computing and Information Services prepared the technology and trained exam proctors.
Constance Panton MD’21, MPH, who’d studied for months only to have two different exam dates canceled, was able to take Step 2 at Brown on May 27, the day the site opened. “My first reaction was relief,” she says. “It’s nearly impossible to keep up the momentum of entire workday study schedules required of these USMLE exams while also on clinical rotations, so I felt that I would have needed to drop a summer elective to allocate two or four weeks of fulltime studying in order to re-prepare for the exam.”
