The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) has taken some sort of disciplinary action against 140 doctors who cheated on their ABIM certification exams. Documents in a now-settled case included e-mails and other correspondence from the doctors to Arora, an exam preparation company.
The e-mails and correspondence revealed that the doctors knew many of the questions and, indeed, followed up by sending to Arora memorized test questions from their own certification exams to help the certified-doctors-in-waiting. The doctors do promise confidentiality when they register for the ABIM exam and are reminded of that confidentiality.
They also are reminded not to pass along test questions. ABIM has disciplined the doctors with a range of sanctions from letter reprimands through various discipline levels including revoking the passing of exams (for one to five years) and certification (also for one to five years and, for some, into eternity) and naming five of them as defendants in a suit by ABIM for copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets (that is, passing along the exam questions). 25 One doctor posted the following on the Regator blog, “But is it really cheating? College kids do it all the time.” Others call the certification exam “antiquated” with “no correlation” between certification and improved medical outcomes. List the ethical categories and describe any rationalizations given. List the stakeholders. What ethical discussion in this chapter would you use to convince the doctors that cheating is not in their best interest?