Response: Re: Performance on the Maintenance of Certification for Family Physicians (MC-FP) Examination: Comparison of Initial Certifiers with Experienced Physicians

We appreciate Dr. Volpintesta’s commentary and suggestions. We suspected that the differences between pass rates and mean scores were not well known with regard to the MC-FP examination. That was one of our motivations for writing the article. In other research1 using a cross-sectional design, we looked at examinee performance by the number of times they have successfully recertified. In that study we detected an improvement with additional experience for those diplomates who had continuously maintained their certification, but this was not true for diplomates with gaps in their certification. This finding runs contrary to the “conventional wisdom” in the family medicine community, which suggests that recent residency graduates, who have been exposed to the most up-to-date information, would demonstrate a better grasp of contemporary medical knowledge than would physicians who are many years out from training. We believe that keeping this research as a topic of discussion in family medicine is important.

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