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Preparing for the Examination
The COMAT internal medicine examination is designed to be taken after you have taken the prerequisite classroom education and after you have participated in a clinical rotation or clerkship in the field of internal medicine at your own college of osteopathic medicine or COM. The COMAT examination you take has been created by your COM and is designed to assess both your knowledge and skills in this area of medicine as well as how well your COM has presented the material to you as part of your education. The information you’ve learned and will demonstrate in the exam will be necessary to assimilate prior to entering an osteopathic or allopathic residency program after graduation.
There are two dimensions covered in the examination. The first of these is patient presentation and the second is called physician tasks. The areas involved in the patient presentation aspect of the exam are divided equally among the different body systems, while the physician task breakdown is divided into health promotion or disease prevention, history, physical exam, and diagnostics, management, and pathophysiology. The majority of questions are based on diagnostic skills and management so these will be emphasized in this course.
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The examination itself will consist of just 125 questions you will be asked to complete in 2.5 hours after a five-minute tutorial. The questions will be different from one COMAT examination to another and will differ in their level of difficulty but are designed to be reliable from test to test, regardless of which one you take.
The score you receive will be based on a mean score of 100 and a standard deviation of 10. Each test is validated and reviewed annually so as to be consistent over time and among the different examinations. On the NBOME website, there is a table that converts the mean score to a percentile rank. Using this table, you will see that a score of 100 is equivalent to being at the 50th percentile among other students. There is no real pass or fail aspect to this examination.
