About

What the SI MedEd family is

One portal, two doors

This portal serves the whole universe, but the family is organized around two audiences and two flagships:

• Faculty and staff — their flagship is SILME, the LCME accreditation hub: the 12 standards and 83 elements, an accreditation toolkit of official documents, role-based LCME 101 guides, an updates tracker, and Elsie, a Q&A assistant that answers from the standards text.
• Students and applicants — their flagship is SI Med School: the student counterpart of SILME — medical school admissions, the path through the USMLE, and the resources students actually need, in plain language.

What SILME is to faculty and staff, SI Med School is to students — and this site, SI MedEd, is the front door to both. The three flagships link to each other prominently and reciprocally, so no one gets lost between audiences.

Going deeper: the exam guides

Beyond the two flagships, the family covers the licensing exams in depth:

• SI Med Exams — the exam-side portal, the full set of exam guides in one place.
• SI USMLE — how the United States Medical Licensing Examination is structured and how the three Steps fit together.
• SI Step 1 — the pass/fail exam: what's tested, how to plan around it, and how to interpret the result.
• SI Step 2 CK — the highest-stakes exam in the sequence: study planning, score strategy, and how programs use the number.

Who it's for

Three audiences, three problems:

• Applicants face an admissions process with real stakes and a fog of myths. The SI Med School guide exists to separate what the published data actually says from what forum lore says — and to make the timeline, the essays, and the interviews feel manageable.
• Medical students face a licensing sequence that determines residency options. The SI Med Exams portal and the SI USMLE, SI Step 1, and SI Step 2 CK guides explain what each exam actually covers, how scores are used, and how to plan study around clerkships — without selling a prep product.
• Educators and administrators face accreditation work that runs on scattered PDFs and jargon. SILME puts the standards, the toolkit, role guides, and an updates tracker in one place, with Elsie on call for questions.

How it uses public data

Everything on these sites is built from public, national sources — the kind of material anyone can look up, cited by year and source:

• AAMC — admissions statistics (such as the Medical School Admission Requirements data and FACTS tables), the Graduation Questionnaire, and other published surveys and reports.
• NBME — published performance data and the information bulletins that describe what its examinations cover.
• NRMP — Charting Outcomes in the Match and other published match statistics.
• LCME — Functions and Structure of a Medical School, the glossary, webinars, and other public materials on accreditation standards.

What you will not find here: school-internal data, leaked exam content, proprietary question banks, or anything confidential. If it can't be cited to a public source, it doesn't go on the site.

Editorial approach

The editorial posture is translator, not pundit. Each guide's job is to take a dense official document and return it in plain language — accurate to the source, with the source linked, and with the limits of the source stated. That means:

• Summarize and paraphrase, never reproduce. Copyrighted instrument text, exam questions, and long official passages are not republished here. You get a faithful summary and a link to the original.
• Guidance, not advising. These sites give you the information to think clearly. They don't make decisions for you, and they aren't a substitute for your academic advisor, your dean's office, or the official guidance.
• Uncertainty is labeled. Where the data is thin, contested, or speculative — including claims about AI in medical education — the guide says so rather than smoothing it over.
• Corrections are welcome. These guides are maintained, and the official sources are linked as authoritative. If something is wrong or out of date, that should be fixed.

Contact

SI MedEd is an independent project. For questions, corrections, or feedback on any of the guides, the contact channel is noted on each site's page; the official bodies have their own channels for official matters — please use the USMLE, NBME, LCME, NRMP, and AAMC websites for anything that needs an authoritative answer.