Professional Development

Ivy League med students are using this Newark-based online platform to study

Exam Master serves 215 institutions across the world, but it all started in 1994 in a big house in Newark, Del.

Med students are using Exam Master to pass their board exams. (Photo by Flickr user sari_dennise, used under a Creative Commons license)
What do medical students at schools like Harvard, YaleStanford and Johns Hopkins all have in common. Besides being a bunch of dorks with enviably lucrative futures and the smarts to match, they’re all using the same online platform to study for their board exams.

Newark-based company Exam Master has been helping med students pass their board exams since its founding in 1994, when their product wasn’t an online platform as much as it was a self-testing system for medicine on a CD-Rom. The majority of users back then was foreign medical graduates who needed to pass the board exams before practicing in the U.S.
“They were at a distinct disadvantage,” said president and CEO Matt Bader, who began his involvement with the company in 2003. “For them to come over here and be able to get into a U.S. residency program was very difficult.”
Thus, Exam Master found and capitalized upon its niche market.
As the company entered the early 2000s, it aptly transitioned the software to an online-based platform. As Exam Master gained popularity and new clients, Bader said the product branched out into three separate platforms — a testing system for institutions to provide to their students (Exam Master OnLine), a system for individual student access (Exam Master Advantage) and a third system for faculty members to provide their classes (Academic Manager).
Bader said Exam Master now serves about 215 institutions across the world. Up until six years ago, the now 21 employee-strong team used to work out of a big house complete with a company dog and cat. Exam Master employees a small development team to service its 215 institutional clients — including a software architect, a developer who doubles as a database engineer, a software tester and a product manager.
Bader said he’s hoping to add social interaction to Exam Master’s product mix in the near future.
“Right now, when somebody signs up to study, they are kind of doing it on their own,” he said. “We’d like to make that much more of a social experience.” Could future Exam Master users have the ability to share test results with colleagues and comment on/rate test questions? Bader said it’s something he’d like to see.
“We’d like to create a community around preparation and self-study.”

Companies: Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine / Harvard University

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