the formation of InCUS), they have changed their stance in support of the public opinion. Humayun Chaudhry, the President of the FSMB, (who was originally in opposition to the Step changes), later said that “although the primary purpose of the exam is to assess the knowledge and skills essential to safe patient care, the new policies will “address concerns about Step 1 scores impacting student well-being and medical education.” Because students put so much emphasis on getting a high USMLE Step 1 score, they often skimmed the medical school curriculum that they deemed to be not as relevant in order to get the maximum score on the USMLE Step 1. Use of Step 1 scores by residency programs The medical community has criticized the USMLE and residency programs for using Step 1 scores as the main screening tool in selecting applicants for a residency interview, creating a "barrier that was never meant to exist." Residency directors are “overweighting a screening test in a manner not supported by evidence and for which the test was not specifically designed. Step 1 was designed as a Pass/Fail exam, and beyond the Pass/Fail designation, the scores were not meant to have meaning. Residency program directors utilize the scores as a means of filtering the significant applications down to a more manageable number that allows for a more thorough review of the remaining applications. A significant amount of residency program directors believe that the conversion to Pass/Fail will make "applicant screening more arduous." For state licensing purposes, the exam always has been Pass/Fail, but over the past few years, its three-digit numeric score has been used as the main determination in granting medical interviews. In recent years, an applicant's Step 1 score has been cited by residency program directors as their most important criterion in selecting graduating medical students for their residency program, despite lack of evidence or data to support that practice. Average USMLE Step 1 scores for various residencies are available in Charting Outcomes in the Match. Studies on Step 1 performance found that "Step 1 is neither precise nor does it predict student performance as residents beyond a certain threshold. With a standard error of eight points, two applicants with scores as far as 15 points apart may not be meaningfully different and yet several programs use singular cutoff points as screening tools." This, as well as the negative impact on student