MPH competency exams - do programs share your actual score or just pass/fail with advisors?
I'm in my second year of an accredited MPH program and have my comprehensive competency assessment coming up in about 8 weeks. The program handbook describes it as pass/fail but I've heard conflicting things from students a year ahead of me - some said advisors saw actual scores and others said it's truly blind graded with just a pass threshold shown.
The exam covers the five CEPH core competencies plus our program-specific concentration areas. I'm in health policy and management, so about 40% of my exam is epidemiology and biostatistics fundamentals I haven't touched as much as concentration coursework. I'm scoring about 71% on practice items in epi/biostats and I'm not sure where the pass threshold actually sits.
I'm also trying to figure out the right balance between depth and breadth. The exam is 4 hours total and covers a lot of ground. I've been doing 90 minutes per day for the past 3 weeks with about 60% of that on weaker areas. Has anyone been through a CEPH-accredited comp and can describe what the actual experience was like?
I found the health policy case studies more time-consuming than the quantitative sections. Budget extra time for those if your program has case-based components - I underestimated how long it takes to write through stakeholder analysis frameworks under timed conditions.
The epi/biostats section of comps is almost always more conceptual than computational at the MPH level - they're testing whether you can interpret results, not run regressions. Reviewing study designs and how to read epidemiological tables is probably more useful than drilling formulas right now.
90 minutes a day for 8 weeks is solid prep. I'd do one full timed mock exam about 3 weeks out to understand the pacing - 4 hours feels like plenty until you're actually in it and the case prompts run long.
At my program it was genuinely pass/fail with a 70% threshold, and advisors only saw that you passed - not your actual score. That said, I'd still take it seriously because failing requires a retest that delays graduation, and the makeup exam at my school was apparently harder than the original.
So I can actually speak to this from experience because I failed my first attempt. My program said pass/fail but when I met with my advisor she definitely knew more than just "you didn't pass" -- she referenced specific competency domains I'd struggled with, so yeah, they see more than they let on. It wasn't embarrassing or anything, she was helpful about it, but just know that pass/fail on paper doesn't mean they're flying blind.
For the second attempt what I changed was honestly pretty simple. I stopped trying to memorize everything and focused on being able to apply concepts to scenarios, especially for epi and biostatistics. The exam isn't testing whether you know definitions, it's testing whether you can think through a public health problem. I also gave myself more time with the core competency framework my program uses and mapped my studying to those specific areas. Passed the second time with no issues.