1.1 Board Exam Architecture, Scoring, and the Performance Section

1.1 Board Exam Architecture, Scoring, and the Performance Section

Exam Alert: ABMDI publishes the exact deliverables for the Performance Section, and they are minimum counts, not vague expectations. Each scenario requires at least ten interview questions and at least five items of potential evidence, plus a brief scene description in medicolegal terms. Candidates who write one beautiful paragraph and four questions have already lost points they cannot recover.

Board Certification is the advanced tier of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators (ABMDI) and is open only to investigators who already hold Registry Diplomate (D-ABMDI) certification. Where the Registry examination is scoped to the National Institute of Justice guide Death Investigation: A Guide for the Scene Investigator and the 40 Fundamental Tasks of Medicolegal Death Investigation, the Board examination is scoped to the Advanced Skills List reproduced in Appendix H of the ABMDI Policy and Procedure Manual. Passing earns the designation Fellow of the ABMDI (F-ABMDI) and a certification number.

---

Examination Architecture: Two Parts, 5.5 Hours

Both parts are delivered on a computer and proctored virtually by a live, remote proctor working for an ABMDI subcontractor. There is no paper-and-pencil alternative. The proctor confirms identity with a valid government-issued photo ID, and the testing room must be quiet, adequately lit, and free of unauthorized aids. Testing must be scheduled within 12 months of the application packet being received, or fees are forfeited and the application defaults.

---

Part 1: The Performance Section

Each of the three scenarios gives you a written scenario about the death plus a set of scene photographs. You have 30 minutes per scenario, and ABMDI states plainly that all answers must be based solely on the information provided in the case scenario and depicted in the scene photographs.

What ABMDI actually asks for

For every scenario, the examinee must produce three things:

1. At least five items of evidence. Identify the physical, biological, and trace items the scenario and photographs put in front of you.
2. At least ten questions to be asked of the suspect or witnesses.
3. A brief description of the scene, written using medicolegal terms.

The instruction candidates most often ignore

ABMDI is explicit: "Since you only have 30 minutes for each case, you DO NOT need to interpret findings, solve the case or develop a complete case report."

This single sentence should reshape how you practice. The Performance Section is not a request for the full investigative report you would file in your own office. It does not want your cause-and-manner opinion, your reconstruction, or your theory of who did it. It wants evidence you can see, questions a competent investigator would ask, and clean medicolegal description. Candidates who spend 22 of their 30 minutes crafting an exhaustive narrative routinely submit three or four questions and two evidence items — and those are the two components scored as objective, countable items.

How the Performance Section is graded

The Educational Review Committee grades ABMDI short-answer questions. It has three members, all of whom sit on the Board of Directors and are Board Certified Fellows, with the Executive Director and Educational Consultant as ex-officio members; every member signs a Grading Confidentiality Statement.

• The subjective items — the description of the scene and body — are reviewed by two members using standardized answer or key-word sheets developed by the Advisory Council. The two independent reviews are then correlated as a measure of consistency. This is how ABMDI controls performance-test reliability.
• The evidence items and investigative questions are treated as objective "matching"-type items and are handled with the same psychometric methods as the multiple-choice test.

The practical consequence of that split: your evidence list and your question set are scored against a key. Every correct item you fail to write down is a point you simply did not earn. Writing eleven plausible questions instead of nine costs you nothing and can only help.

Note on rubrics: ABMDI does not publish a public scoring rubric, point allocation, or list of automatic deductions for the Performance Section. Any study resource that prints one — including a table of "penalty benchmarks" — is inferring, not quoting. Treat the official deliverable counts and the key-word-sheet grading method as the only firm facts, and treat everything else as practice technique.

A defensible 30-minute work plan

Because the questions and evidence list are key-scored and the description is holistically reviewed, put the countable items first. One workable allocation:

• Minutes 0–4 — Read and mark. Work the scenario text and every photograph. Mark timestamps, ambient conditions, medications, ligatures, weapons, and any contradiction between the narrative and the images.
• Minutes 4–12 — Evidence list. Write items continuously and aim well past five. Note what each item is and how it would be collected and packaged.
• Minutes 12–21 — Questions. Write past ten. Name the person each question is directed to. Keep them open-ended.
• Minutes 21–29 — Brief scene description. Objective medicolegal prose. Anatomical position, measurements from fixed landmarks, postmortem changes as observed.
• Minute 30 — Stop. Move to the next scenario whatever state you are in. An unstarted third scenario cannot be rescued.

---

Writing in Medicolegal Terms

The description is judged against Advisory Council key words, so vocabulary is not decoration — it is the scoring surface. Three habits carry most of the value:

• Describe, do not conclude. "A 9 mm circular defect with a surrounding 2 mm circumferential marginal abrasion is present on the right temple, 4 cm superior and 2 cm anterior to the external auditory canal" is a finding. "Entrance gunshot wound from the suspect's weapon" is a conclusion the section did not ask for.
• Use standard anatomical position. Describe every defect relative to anatomical position regardless of how the body was found, and use anterior/posterior, medial/lateral, proximal/distal rather than front, side, up, or down.
• Pair every measurement with a landmark and a unit. Distances run from bony or fixed landmarks (external auditory canal, sternal notch, heel, anterior midline) in metric units.

---

Part 2: The 240-Item Multiple-Choice Section

The multiple-choice portion contains 240 validated items drawn from a rotated bank and must be completed in up to 4 hours. It is divided into 8 sections, each mapping to a lettered group in the Advanced Skills List. Section 1.5 walks the full 46-task blueprint; the section headings are:

1. Investigating Specific Death Scenes
2. Investigating Multiple Fatalities
3. Investigating Atypical Death Scenes
4. Investigating Institutional Deaths
5. Demonstrating Leadership Skills
6. Demonstrating Legal Knowledge
7. Communication Skills
8. Demonstrating Advanced Forensic Science Knowledge

Scoring: there is no published passing percentage

This is the single most misreported fact about the ABMDI exams. ABMDI sets a separate cut score for each section using the modified Angoff method: at least three subject matter experts rate every item by estimating how many qualified medicolegal death investigators would answer it correctly, questions with a rating range over 30 are re-reviewed or removed, and the averaged ratings for the items in a section become that section's cut score.

Three consequences follow, and all three are tested by experience rather than by arithmetic:

• You must pass every section. The whole test is not averaged into one score. A strong showing in Advanced Forensic Science Knowledge does not offset a failed Legal Knowledge section.
• Sections have different cut scores. Each section's cut score reflects the measured difficulty of its own items, so there is no universal percentage target.
• Numerical scores are never released. The testing agency reports pass/fail only, to you and to the ABMDI office.

Because the whole test is not averaged, there is also a retest benefit: you retest only the section or sections you failed, with at least 30 days between testing dates. A candidate has three attempts to pass the entire certification examination within an application cycle; after a third failure, remediation requires restarting the application in full, accumulating additional investigation experience, and obtaining sign-offs from different practitioners.