Aquifer Calibrate is a new formative assessment system specifically designed to help you focus on high-yield learning to support your clinical course success and clinical reasoning development.
Calibrate is grounded in evidence-based approaches to help students become efficient, effective learners.
Why Participate?
Early Access – Quality Questions – Innovation & Incentives
Participation brings you:
Quality assessment questions
Access to quality assessment questions for practice or to prepare for exams in a safe space.
Actionable results for your learning
Find gaps in your understanding and calibrate knowledge and certainty, and take action with links to explanations and trusted resources.
Note: Faculty have no access to results during this pilot – your results are just for you.
Contribute to a new innovation
Help support the development of a new national formative assessment system for medical and health professions education.
Gift Card Incentive
Each participant who completes the assessment & survey will receive a $40 gift card after completing the beta test.
About Calibrate
Calibrate assessments are:
- Single answer multiple-choice exams with a certainty rating for each question, which adds a new dimension—beyond right or wrong answers—to provide a more complete picture of your understanding
- 35-45 questions long, to be completed in about an hour
- Designed to be given twice during a clinical rotation—early and late—to help learners focus their study, provide multiple opportunities for practice, and assess their progress
- Each assessment includes a representative sample of comprehensive questions linked to Aquifer content and the national medical student clerkship curriculum
- Developed, written, and peer-reviewed by teams of trained medical educators
- Available for family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, and radiology
How Calibrate Helps
Identify true knowledge gaps
Calibrate your knowledge & certainty
Did you truly know the answer? Or was that a lucky guess? With the addition of a certainty rating, you can drill down to identify true knowledge gaps by seeing how your knowledge and certainty align.
Checkpoints to track your progress
Benefit from repetitive practice
Designed to be taken twice during a rotation or course, Calibrate provides structured checkpoints along the way to be sure you’re on track before the end of your course–and your final exam.
Easy follow-up with trusted tools
For efficient clinical learning
Results allow you to take action quickly with links to detailed explanations—and review relevant Aquifer cases to see the concept applied to a realistic clinical setting. You can also create a learning plan to address weak areas in clinic.
WE NEED YOUR HELP
Join the Beta Test
As part of our development process, Aquifer is recruiting physician assistant and nurse practitioner students to take a Calibrate assessment of their choice and provide feedback to help us optimize this new learning tool, supporting next-level validation of the algorithm driving some components of Calibrate reports.
After the beta test, Calibrate will undergo pilot testing with selected schools before becoming widely available to medical and health professions students.
When:
Apply now to schedule an assessment between October 1, 2022 – January 27, 2023
Who:
Any physician assistant or nurse practitioner students who are interested in taking an assessment in:
- Family medicine
- Internal medicine
- Pediatrics
- Radiology
Your results will be calibrated to account for whether you’re taking the exam early (as a pre-test or early in the relevant rotation) or late (toward the end or after completing the relevant rotation).
Time Commitment:
Less than 2 hours to complete the requirements.
If you decide to do a deep-dive into your results, complete a debrief worksheet, or follow-up with the suggested links (all super useful, but totally optional), that will go beyond the two hours.
How:
To apply, please complete our short online application. If you meet the qualifications to participate, Aquifer will be in touch to set up your assessment and go through next steps.
REQUIREMENTS FOR PARTICIPATION
- Schedule your exam with Aquifer to fit within your rotation schedule (between October 1, 2022 – January 27, 2023)
- Review brief orientation materials to help you make the most of your experience (5 min)
- Complete the assessment (45-75 minutes) within a 7-day window of your scheduled exam to the best of your ability–as if you were completing the assessment as part of your current rotation or course
- Review results reports (available immediately) in detail (approx. 15 minutes)
- Complete a survey, providing substantive feedback about your experience, the value of the assessment and results, and suggestions for improvement (approx. 10 minutes)
- Recommended (optional): Use your results to drive your learning. Results include links to explanations and Aquifer cases that relate to each question. You are free to follow-up and enhance your knowledge by taking action on these learning resources.
