Two shapes, because a plan is asked to do two different things. Papers
are rehearsal: each block is drawn to the ABP's published weights, so
sitting one says something about how you would do on the day. Domains
are study: the board's twenty-four content areas in its own order and
carrying its own titles, each given the share of the plan the board
gives it on the exam.
Both were written, then run against the real bank, which found two bugs
a unit test on a clean fixture would not have. Domains 19 and 20 —
nephrology and genitourinary — both map to our "Nephrology & Urology",
so a question sat in two pools and was dealt twice; the deal now keeps a
record of what has gone. And chunking every question a domain has into
blocks of forty gave preventive care six blocks and the plan a hundred
and sixty, which is not a plan: blocks are shared out by weight, with at
least one per domain so nothing the board examines is left out.
Built on the live bank alongside what was already there: Boards: Full
Papers (12 × 40) and Boards: By Content Domain (27 blocks, 1069
questions). Nothing existing was touched.
Psychosocial Issues and Child Abuse and Neglect — 6% of the paper
between them — had no category of ours at all, so they could contribute
nothing. Both now exist, with sub-topics named from the board's own
subdomains, and all 24 domains map to categories.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
Four gaps, one change.
Articles could not belong to an exam at all — an article reached one only
by inference through its category, which cannot say that the same article
belongs to a basic-science step and a clinical one showing different
views in each. article_exam_links says whether it is in the group;
Exam.article_views already decided what is shown once you are there.
POST /exams/ wrote name, slug, sort order and active, and silently
dropped family, description and article views, so a new objective landed
in "Other" showing everything whatever was asked for. It writes what it
is given now, and PATCH can change it afterwards.
Membership was one link row at a time, which nobody would do for three
thousand questions. POST /exams/{id}/assign takes whole topics with
everything beneath them — questions and articles both — and is
idempotent, so widening a selection and running it again adds only what
is new.
And the point of all of it: a real paper is not a uniform draw. The ABP
publishes that 12% of a general paediatrics exam is preventive care and
2% is rheumatology; forty questions drawn evenly is forty coin flips.
exam_blueprints holds a board's published outline — its own numbering,
its headings, its weights — and blueprint_category_links maps it onto
our taxonomy rather than bending the tree to fit, because their outline
is arranged for examining and ours for studying.
The sampler uses largest-remainder, so twenty-four percentages still come
to forty questions, and a domain that cannot supply its share gives the
shortfall back to be spread over those that can — the paper keeps its
length and loses only accuracy, and the working is returned so the
shortfall is visible rather than silent.
Seeded from the ABP General Pediatrics Content Outline (Oct 2024):
structure and published weights only, no exam material. 120 lines, 22 of
24 domains mapped; Psychosocial Issues and Child Abuse and Neglect have
no category of ours and are reported rather than hidden.
Creating an objective is now an administrator's rather than a
moderator's: it appears in everyone's picker and scopes the whole bank,
which is site configuration, and it sits with the other site switches a
moderator cannot reach.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
