certifiable

yesterday morning i took the exam to become a certified medical transcriptionist (cmt), after studying the breadth and scope of the medical field for several weeks, and i passed! i am now officially a cmt. my wall certificate and my pin are in the mail.

the exam was much easier than i would have imagined. the first part consisted of multiple-choice questions and i knew about 80% to 85% of those answers right off the bat. they were plainly easy. of the rest i was able to eliminate a few of the choices and then take an educated stab. it was a strange mix of very basic questions and random off-the-wall specialty-specific questions. the second part of the exam was transcription from audio and proofreading. where i work, at multicare, we must have some extremely difficult dictators, because the sample of dictators on the exam yesterday was comparatively clear. understanding them was not a challenge at all. the proofreading questions were by and large simple as well; they just took close reading.

i'm sure i didn't totally ace the test; i got some questions wrong - i would be very surprised otherwise. but the bad thing is i don't know which ones i missed and they won't tell me. i'd like to know what it is i don't know, so i can come to know it. duh. i was told, however, by someone on the inside of the association for health documentation integrity (ahdi) (formerly the american association of medical transcription [aamt]) that i cannot be told which questions i missed because the association wants to maintain the integrity not only of health documentation but also of the cmt exam. i might tell potential test-takers the questions or something.

and i can understand that point of view, but i didn't even get a percentage grade when i took the test. i don't know by what margin i passed. this individual on the inside (she's a fellow of the american association of medical transcription [hence a faamt, and maybe soon a fahdi]) tells me that in eventual permutations of the exam, test-takers will get a percentage grade or at least something along those lines. that's the future, though.

so i have to live with knowing only that i answered enough questions accurately to satisfy the ahdi. which i suppose i can do. i don't particularly think that the exam was a good indicator of one's skill as a transcriptionist. i only had to actually transcribe, at most, a sentence or two on any given question. a better test, in my opinion, might have the applicant transcribe complete reports, for example. but these things are not up to me. (obviously such an exam would be considerably more painstaking to grade.) i suppose the point is that i'm now a cmt, one of only two in multicare's transcription department (the other is my friend kristi who took the exam last week!), and that means something.