The effect of changes in medical knowledge on examination performance at the time of recertification.

The purpose of this paper was to determine if the decline in performance with time since completion of training on the 1980 ABIM Recertification Examination can be explained by a difference in performance on items testing different types of knowledge. Results showed that candidates further out of training performed less well on items testing new or changing knowledge, while performance on items testing stable knowledge was relatively constant across age groups.