title: Developing a situational judgment test blueprint for assessing the non-cognitive skills of applicants to the University of Utah School of Medicine, the United States.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The situational judgment test (SJT) shows promise for assessing the non-cognitive skills of medical school applicants, but has only been used in Europe. Since the admissions processes and education levels of applicants to medical school are different in the United States and in Europe, it is necessary to obtain validity evidence of the SJT based on a sample of United States applicants.
  
  
  METHODS
  Ninety SJT items were developed and Kane's validity framework was used to create a test blueprint. A total of 489 applicants selected for assessment/interview day at the University of Utah School of Medicine during the 2014-2015 admissions cycle completed one of five SJTs, which assessed professionalism, coping with pressure, communication, patient focus, and teamwork. Item difficulty, each item's discrimination index, internal consistency, and the categorization of items by two experts were used to create the test blueprint.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The majority of item scores were within an acceptable range of difficulty, as measured by the difficulty index (0.50-0.85) and had fair to good discrimination. However, internal consistency was low for each domain, and 63% of items appeared to assess multiple domains. The concordance of categorization between the two educational experts ranged from 24% to 76% across the five domains.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The results of this study will help medical school admissions departments determine how to begin constructing a SJT. Further testing with a more representative sample is needed to determine if the SJT is a useful assessment tool for measuring the non-cognitive skills of medical school applicants.
authors.affiliation: Department of Internal Medicine Administration, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
authors.forename: Jorie M
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-7419-7588
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Colbert-Getz
authors.affiliation: Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
authors.forename: Karly
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0596-5907
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Pippitt
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Assistant Dean of Admissions, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-8269-8048
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Chan
keywords: Cognition; Communication; Judgment; School admission criteria; United States