Physics & Radbio

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4 months is too much. Depending on how much time/day you're devoting to it, 1.5-2.5 months is enough.
Agreed. Now orals on the other hand...

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Sorry to bump an old thread. Long-time lurker first time poster. For a variety of reasons I was unable to start studying until now. I plan on devoting 2-3 hrs/day to studying from now till July then cramming hard. Is this a reasonable approach (not like I have a choice, just looking for reassurance!)
 
Bumping this thread. Good luck to everyone taking the physics/Radbio exam in about a month!

I have no idea if the poster above passed but this nooblet will have had just about 6 weeks to study for the thing. Reading Basic Radiotherapy Physics and Biology by Chang a couple times and planning to do as many Raphex exams as possible and the ASTRO radbio stuff. All this while doing the regular senior radonc resident stuff.

One thing I have noticed is that our predecessors must have had a significantly harder exam. The difference between the 2007 raphex and the 2017 exam is MASSIVE!
 
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Bumping this thread. Good luck to everyone taking the physics/Radbio exam in about a month!

I have no idea if the poster above passed but this nooblet will have had just about 6 weeks to study for the thing. Reading Basic Radiotherapy Physics and Biology by Chang a couple times and planning to do as many Raphex exams as possible and the ASTRO radbio stuff. All this while doing the regular senior radonc resident stuff.

One thing I have noticed is that our predecessors must have had a significantly harder exam. The difference between the 2007 raphex and the 2017 exam is MASSIVE!

6 weeks is probably fine. Questions are the highest yield at this point. ASTRO Study Guides are enough to pass radbio and I wouldn't even bother reading a textbook for it. You'll probably feel like you failed regardless but an overwhelming majority pass. Good luck!
 
Physics was as expected. I read the entire McDermott book and did the last 3 RAPHEX exams and thought that was adequate.

Radbio, well... it looks like there were a lot of complaints last year about the exam changing to fail more people. I wish I had seen that thread before just now. It was a very bad test. Questions trying to test basic concepts were worded poorly leaving me wondering if I am screwing up an answer to a basic concept I understand very well. The rest of the test contained a ridiculous amount of PhD-level cellular biology minutiae. Conventional wisdom I read suggested that radbio was much easier than the overly difficult ASTRO study guide. I disagree. I would say it was almost as tough if not worse. People have said you need a >70% raw correct to pass radbio in the past, which worries me as I think it's very doubtful I got that due to the large amount of completely random guessing on minutiae. I felt there was way too much pointless trivia on the exam. Very very poorly written test, and I can see absolutely no way that knowing a lot of the facts we were tested on better certify us as competent clinicians (isn't this the point of the exam)? I hope I'm not the only one really, really worried about this.
 
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Physics: significantly harder than I expected. More equations/calculations than in the last 2 years (per co-residents who took it previously). I partially feel like I choked and forgot easy stuff but... we’ll see. Feeling like I might be back next year for this part. For what it’s worth, I listened to Caggiano x2 and did the 4 most recent Raphexii.

Radbio: a number of out-of-left-field type questions where I simply hadn’t heard of the gene/enzyme/etc but I anticipated some of that. This part felt easier to me but I guess we’ll see.

Good luck everyone!
 
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Physics was as expected. I read the entire McDermott book and did the last 3 RAPHEX exams and thought that was adequate.

Radbio, well... it looks like there were a lot of complaints last year about the exam changing to fail more people. I wish I had seen that thread before just now. It was a very bad test. Questions trying to test basic concepts were worded poorly leaving me wondering if I am screwing up an answer to a basic concept I understand very well. The rest of the test contained a ridiculous amount of PhD-level cellular biology minutiae. Conventional wisdom I read suggested that radbio was much easier than the overly difficult ASTRO study guide. I disagree. I would say it was almost as tough if not worse. People have said you need a >70% raw correct to pass radbio in the past, which worries me as I think it's very doubtful I got that due to the large amount of completely random guessing on minutiae. I felt there was way too much pointless trivia on the exam. Very very poorly written test, and I can see absolutely no way that knowing a lot of the facts we were tested on better certify us as competent clinicians (isn't this the point of the exam)? I hope I'm not the only one really, really worried about this.


Agree with this assessment. Too many questions unrelated to the astro radbio exams, which were more detailed but better written than the actual exam. But fwiw I talked to 3 others who felt the same way so hopefully we’re all on the same boat. If it’s true that you need a raw score over 70 to pass the yes I’m definitely worried as well.

I thought physics was fair. Few of the calculations were more complicated than I expected but overall only a few questions out of left field.
 
Physics was as expected. I read the entire McDermott book and did the last 3 RAPHEX exams and thought that was adequate.

Radbio, well... it looks like there were a lot of complaints last year about the exam changing to fail more people. I wish I had seen that thread before just now. It was a very bad test. Questions trying to test basic concepts were worded poorly leaving me wondering if I am screwing up an answer to a basic concept I understand very well. The rest of the test contained a ridiculous amount of PhD-level cellular biology minutiae. Conventional wisdom I read suggested that radbio was much easier than the overly difficult ASTRO study guide. I disagree. I would say it was almost as tough if not worse. People have said you need a >70% raw correct to pass radbio in the past, which worries me as I think it's very doubtful I got that due to the large amount of completely random guessing on minutiae. I felt there was way too much pointless trivia on the exam. Very very poorly written test, and I can see absolutely no way that knowing a lot of the facts we were tested on better certify us as competent clinicians (isn't this the point of the exam)? I hope I'm not the only one really, really worried about this.

Agreed. Physics was as expected, although some of the questions were a bit tricky. More math/problems than I had expected, but most weren't overly complicated (at least on the surface). At least the test was fair.

Radbio was an overly difficult test. Cellular biology minutiae to the extreme - if you did not know every possible molecule, phosphorylation path, cdk, protein, kinase, etc, you were going to find this difficult. Even questions that tested core concepts were written strangely or had seemingly odd answer choices. It was nothing like the fairly comprehensive ASTRO study guide (which by the way, did not have an updated version for 2018 thanks a lot) nor the last 4-5 years of inservice questions. The ABR does a terrible job of giving us an adequate direction to go in regarding what materials to use for studying. If they're going to make the test difficult, fine, but at least guide us in a direction to study besides "read an entire textbook." There was also no mention on the ABR website in advance that each test had 100 questions, which would have been nice know.

The problem with the Physics/Radbio (especially Radbio) exams is that they aren't related to our clinical competency and need to be revamped or scrapped. Radbio has potential to be more useful than it currently is and involve more things we actually deal with in clinic (ie immunotherapy) and should actually understand. Even more difficult for residents to try and work together and get these courses/exams changed is the fact that high pass rates mean that residents don't care anymore once they see that PASS and just move on. I know I can't be the first person to think this. It would be nice to try and see some change moving forward, but I guess decades of residents have dealt with the status quo and since they did it we should too. Oh well - hope everyone passed and good luck in the waiting period.
 
I felt there was way too much pointless trivia on the exam. Very very poorly written test, and I can see absolutely no way that knowing a lot of the facts we were tested on better certify us as competent clinicians (isn't this the point of the exam)?
Ugh. All that info as useful to us as clinicians as the anatomy of the recurrent laryngeal nerve was to Luciano Pavarotti.
 
I thought both exams were difficult.

Physics was def more fair, although some of the calculations were more involved than I expected and some of the answer choice wording had me tripped up.

The radbio was filled with minutiae. I don’t think the ASTRO exams were a good representation of the exam. The level of detail asked about the pathways was ridiculous given that we are clinical radiation oncologists and not PhDs.

Anyone know about how many correct answers needed to be in the passing range? Like a raw score of 70 or above?

Most of us will pass... so just have to hope for the best!
 
Any thoughts on today's test???

Yes. My thoughts as I walked out, "Oh God, I really think I just failed." That was followed by, "If I failed, how could I possibly be better prepared next year using the same study materials as this time???"

Physics seemed fair (but that's not to be taken as meaning easy. It did start out relatively easy for me, but then suddenly there was a long string of calcs. It threw off my time management a bit. Many of the calcs were straightforward, but there were definitely several that asked about concepts in a way I had not seen previously and I struggled trying to figure out how to calculate answers.

RadBio...I'm not sure how a person could have prepared for that. I worked my way through a few of the study guides and really tried to understand all the questions as well as the info in the foils. Despite that, there were a lot of questions that asked about molecules etc. that I'm fairly certain I never came across at all in the study guides. With the study guides, it seemed usually foils included several options you would recognize and therefore know were incorrect. Today, there were times I did not know the function/mechanism of a single one of the answer choices, so I couldn't even narrow them down. That's not to say the study guides were worthless; there were a decent number of questions today that I thought were well covered by the guides. However, I would definitely not say a person could answer 70% correct (if that raw score passing number is legit) solely by learning, let's say, the 3 most recent study guides.
 
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Too many questions unrelated to the astro radbio exams, which were more detailed but better written than the actual exam.

Wow. As somebody who considers the ASTRO rad bio practice exam to have some of the worst-written questions in the history of test-taking, this statement is really rather concerning. Not the question content or depth per se – although I do have some quibbles there too – just the writing. My best guess is that at least 80% of the questions would never pass muster with the psychometricians who vet standardized tests, and never mind all the typos, editing errors, etc.

Granted, the ASTRO exam is not necessarily intended to be just like the real thing, but still...
 
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Wow. As somebody who considers the ASTRO rad bio practice exam to have some of the worst-written questions in the history of test-taking, this statement is really rather concerning. Not the question content or depth per se – although I do have some quibbles there too – just the writing. My best guess is that at least 80% of the questions would never pass muster with the psychometricians who vet standardized tests, and never mind all the typos, editing errors, etc.

Granted, the ASTRO exam is not necessarily intended to be just like the real thing, but still...

I thought that about the ASTRO exams initially too, but after reviewing them thoroughly I thought they did a pretty good job of revealing the content both in depth and precision, by virtue of the way the questions and answer choices were written. You could reason your way to an answer if you understood the concept but maybe didn’t know all the minutiae. I could be alone on that.

I felt the actual exam on the other hand wasn’t as descriptive with their questions and in many cases gave you no opportunity to arrive at an answer unless you realllly knew the random minutiae , which I probably couldn’t prepare for even if I read Hall cover to cover and had an extra month to study.

Just my take. Full disclosure I am NOT a psychometrician :)


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Part of the problem is that residents are now left with no idea how to study for this exam. I had already read Hall cover to cover and gone through 3 years of radbio instruction in my program. It wasn't a new subject to me, so I prepared by going through the most recent ASTRO radbio study guide for a full week, focusing on every explanation and understanding every concept, then making a second pass through it. Then I reviewed chapter summaries in Hall and my class notes. That week's worth of effort maybe helped me answer a handful of questions on the exam. I went home with my mind blown and tried to look up some of the more out-there questions in Hall. It was clear that the level of some of these questions went beyond what is in Hall, and I could not get the answer from that book. I totally get the testmakers' need to include a few extremely challenging questions to differentiate the top 1% of test takers, but it's ridiculous to make those 20-25% of the exam and then to set the minimum passing score before the results even come in. It's like there was a concerted effort to try and write the questions so that more people would miss them and conceal what was needed to adequately prepare for this exam.
 
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Part of the problem is that residents are now left with no idea how to study for this exam. I had already read Hall cover to cover and gone through 3 years of radbio instruction in my program. It wasn't a new subject to me, so I prepared by going through the most recent ASTRO radbio study guide for a full week, focusing on every explanation and understanding every concept, then making a second pass through it. Then I reviewed chapter summaries in Hall and my class notes. That week's worth of effort maybe helped me answer a handful of questions on the exam. I went home with my mind blown and tried to look up some of the more out-there questions in Hall. It was clear that the level of some of these questions went beyond what is in Hall, and I could not get the answer from that book. I totally get the testmakers' need to include a few extremely challenging questions to differentiate the top 1% of test takers, but it's ridiculous to make those 20-25% of the exam and then to set the minimum passing score before the results even come in. It's like there was a concerted effort to try and write the questions so that more people would miss them and conceal what was needed to adequately prepare for this exam.

Guess we have to hope they adjust the passing cutoffs if there are an absurd number of failures. It's honestly more of a cancer biology exam at this point, which is not an in depth point of emphasis in any lecture series or Hall.

Overall, both of these exams are bogus. These exams should be designed so 100% of people pass. If you matched rad onc, you are likely a very intelligent individual who has excelled up to this point. We aren't trying to rank or weed out candidates at this point. These exams should test core competency - does this person understand the basic radiation physics and biology needed to be a competent clinician?
 
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These exams should test core competency - does this person understand the basic radiation physics and biology needed to be a competent clinician?
Agree 100% but the ABR says one thing and does another. All of their tests (including oral boards) are inherently ranking individuals (normative). Ignore excuse of the Angoff process; the radbio test is largely written by scientists who have a different expectation about the "least competent" test taker.
 
Just called ABR. The representative said she had not received any release date info, and quoted a timeline of “4 to 6 weeks, usually closer to 4.” She also said results are typically released before noon Arizona time (which matches Pacific time now, thanks to strange daylight saving time).
 
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Just called ABR. The representative said she had not received any release date info, and quoted a timeline of “4 to 6 weeks, usually closer to 4.” She also said results are typically released before noon Arizona time (which matches Pacific time now, thanks to strange daylight saving time).

I guess the closer to 4 weeks thing isn't holding up this year :(
 
Thought on why results are delayed again this year? More radbio failures than anticipated (I sure would not be surprised)? Even if so, doesn't make sense as they can't curve it per their methodology.

We are in week 6 at this point. Looks like they always used to come out right at 4 weeks until last year when radbio got exponentially harder and they went all the way to 6 weeks.

Anybody know what the radbio pass rate was last year?
 
Thought on why results are delayed again this year?

99% of the responses to this question are going to be on the lines of I know someone who's friend has a brother who's cousin has an ex-girlfriend who's dad went to med school with a guy who says the pass rate was too low and they have to fix it.

Please don't fan the flames of conjecture and fear mongering. There are a lot of possible reasons the release of exam results are delayed. The results will come out eventually.
 
99% of the responses to this question are going to be on the lines of I know someone who's friend has a brother who's cousin has an ex-girlfriend who's dad went to med school with a guy who says the pass rate was too low and they have to fix it.

Please don't fan the flames of conjecture and fear mongering. There are a lot of possible reasons the release of exam results are delayed. The results will come out eventually.

Totally agree - but you got to at least wonder the shady stuff going on here.

Two years with delayed results, a growing consensus that the exams now have completely random questions, and instead of posting individual year pass rates, they started grouping them 3 years at a time...

Conjecture indeed, but weird nevertheless.
 
Super shady. Hard to believe it’s legal.
 

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Thank you for this information. Would you happen to have this for 2017? It's easy to mask odd ball pass rates if they decide to lump 2016, 2017 and 2018 together.
 
Thank you for this information. Would you happen to have this for 2017? It's easy to mask odd ball pass rates if they decide to lump 2016, 2017 and 2018 together.

I don't believe the 2017 pass rate was ever published. The prior data use to be public information until randomly being pulled some time last year.
 
Some seriously concerning stuff going on here. Subjectively reported changes in radbio component going from straightforward and reasonable to the mess the past 2 years have experienced with delayed test results and coincident masking of pass rates. We are at 6 weeks today. Tired of losing sleep over this...
 
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I feel for you guys. When I took Physics ~8 years ago the calculator mysteriously disappeared from the exam. I'm no slouch at math but couldn't calculate inverse natural logs in my head. To add to the problem, some testing centers (like mine) refused to give out hand-held calculators and other test centers did.

It freaked us all out but I think in the end ABR simply threw out all calculation based questions.

It is pure speculation but ABR may have, in this case, crafted some questions which were poorly written and had an unexpectedly high incorrect rate. They probably need to figure out which questions to throw out so that the pass rate is stable with prior years.

Stay strong.
 
The past several years the results have been released on Mondays. I'm assuming that will be the case this year as well. I'm assuming they will will release them this Monday, but who knows.
 
The past several years the results have been released on Mondays. I'm assuming that will be the case this year as well. I'm assuming they will will release them this Monday, but who knows.

That has some logic... so based on the recent playbook plays, that probably won’t happen. I’m SHOCKED that a formal email hasn’t been communicated with exam takers that the results will be delayed beyond 6 weeks. Even more unprofessional, I say.
 
Ouch. Failed rad bio.

I have heard rumors that it can be retaken before next July. Does anyone know if that is true? Or was that something done in the past but no longer?
 
I would hope that the ABR take a serious look at the RadBio test between now and next year. At least put out relevant study guides or direct us to content that will actually be tested, since it has clearly changed over the past few years. Otherwise, it will be difficult for those who failed to find specific ways to improve over the next year. Thankfully, I passed, but am still mad about RadBio and the way it was handled.
 
Waiting was awful, but glad it was today versus Monday. Is the quartertile posting on the web new? Seemed like in the past it was mailed. Maybe another possible reason for the delay?
 
Can people who passed post how they studied and what their breakdowns were? Asking for a friend...
 
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So what about those of us who have now failed physics twice? Any advice? I did significantly better the second time around and felt not too bad after the exam, but still wasn’t enough. Pretty frustrated. Anyone know about the appeals process?
 
Can people who passed post how they studied and what their breakdowns were? Asking for a friend...

For RadBio - did three years of ASTRO tests and looked a lot at the Hall figures and chapter summaries as needed as they related to ASTRO tests. THAT SAID - it almost felt like it didn't matter what I studied as the RadBio test was nothing like was expected. Feel lucky to have passed.

For Physics - did last 7 years of RAPHEX, some more than once to go back and re-look at some of the harder questions or calcs to make sure I understood the concepts. I felt Physics was much more fair.
 
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I am genuinely curious - what kinds of RadBio questions were on the test that people felt were unwarranted?

For me I thought there were a lot of minutia regarding molecular pathways and random genes/molecules that weren’t covered in the astro exams/Hall. Also chemo questions asked about side effects and not mechanisms, which I didn’t think were fair.


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Poorly worded questions that didn't seem to test concepts but rather your ability to guess what they were trying to ask, very random proteins and pathways that weren't mentioned in Hall (and I mean Hall is enough minutiae to learn!). just overall I had heard that if you do ASTRO tests, Rad Bio is a breeze, and it seems like the game has changed. Overall, I know they will still make sure the passing rate stays stable, so that was my only reassurance, but I would bet the raw number of questions correct was lower this year than it may have been in the past.

Physics - for those reading who will take it next year - just do a bunch of tests, which forces you to really understand stuff, and you'll be fine. They can't mess around too much in Physics, as it's mostly the same stuff they ask. Learning it is certainly not easy and takes tons of time, but I think you can fairly prepare for it
 
We can't discuss test questions, but as mentioned above there was a lot of minutae involving molecular biology and specific pathways. Lots of recent stuff not covered in historical texts. I read the entire Hall textbook without skipping anything. It wasn't that I saw stuff that I forgot. It was that I saw things that I had never seen before. Something's wrong when you read the seminal textbook in the field, work through the official study guide/practice test, and then still see multiple novel terms on the exam. The PhDs in cellular biology among us were probably able to skate by on their existing knowledge. Something's wrong when you score in the 2nd quartile and still fail. Have no choice for next year other than to redouble efforts on existing resources and try to find multiple outside resources. I'll be starting next week and studying constantly for the next year and hopefully can get through every textbook, practice test, and review course there is. I don't really have any other choice. Cramming a few astro exams and hall chapter summaries for a few weeks clearly does not work as it did in years past, or at the very least is a risky strategy. The reality is that we have no idea what to expect next year and need to be an experts in radiation biology to comfortably pass this exam as is written. This is what it takes to be certified for minimal clinical competence in radiation oncology apparently!

If someone gets word of pass rates for this year and last year, please report back (or their rationale for not releasing them). Given my quartile breakdown, I feel fairly certain the fail rate this year was around 25-30%.
 
I am genuinely curious - what kinds of RadBio questions were on the test that people felt were unwarranted?

Throwaway account so I can vent...

I am among the poor souls that failed this year... but I failed physics and ended up doing very well on rad bio. Mostly because I have a background in molecular biology but I agree that the rad bio exam was ridiculous. I'm not surprised at all that many people failed. They were asking about ridiculous molecular biology minutiae that most residents would have no clue about. For example... they would ask about a specific pathway that was briefly mentioned in Hall... but then go on to ask about one of the players in that pathway that was never addressed. When I was studying I took some time to read up on pathways beyond what was mentioned in Hall and it paid off... but no one was really expecting to have to do that.

With regards to physics... I'm a bit surprised I failed. It was very reasonable and I did not walk out thinking I bombed it like I did. I did a ton of RAPHEX, read Caggiano, and supplemented with Khan. Not sure what else to do. I guess I just suck at physics.

Congrats to all that passed. Hopefully I'll have better luck next year. It REALLY sucks we can only take this test once a year. I can't imagine what its like for the poster above that failed physics twice.
 
Well it used to be that the oral exam is what we were all scared of, but looks like now radbio and physics is trying to make a name for itself. Hopefully preparing for the oral will seem like cake after what we will now have to do to pass these exams! While the radbio exam was utterly absurd, almost to the point of scandalous, I don't want to discount physics either. I have a strong background in physics, and while I did comfortably pass it, I also studied heavily for it, regrettably moreso than radbio, given that it is a subject that needs to be more conceptually understood rather than memorized. I fully expected top quartile across the board but had a number of 3s as well despite only being unsure about probably <10 questions. The bar of correct questions is clearly high for this exam. Physics is no joke and shouldn't be minimized in light of the radbio ****storm. I highly recommend reading the entire McDermott book and doing all of the end of chapter problems in it before attempting to pound through Raphexes. Don't skim stuff. Spend a few months and consume the whole thing.

I wish there had been a warning that went up last year about radbio. I was caught totally off guard. Looks like there were some hints of it on this forum last year. Hopefully this thread will serve as an official warning to people to taking the exam next year. Our radbio faculty were utterly clueless or didn't care, and the information they had us learn (identical to the same stuff they've been teaching for 20 years) didn't help me with a single question. It makes me ill to think of the hundred hours or so over the past three years we spent memorizing the crap they wanted us to that wasn't tested. I would say it was actually detrimental to our learning. If we had no radbio curriculum at all, I have no doubt I would have done just as well, if not better, because I would have focused more on outside resources instead of what they told us we needed to know to pass the exam.
 
Well it used to be that the oral exam is what we were all scared of, but looks like now radbio and physics is trying to make a name for itself. Hopefully preparing for the oral will seem like cake after what we will now have to do to pass these exams! While the radbio exam was utterly absurd, almost to the point of scandalous, I don't want to discount physics either. I have a strong background in physics, and while I did comfortably pass it, I also studied heavily for it, regrettably moreso than radbio, given that it is a subject that needs to be more conceptually understood rather than memorized. I fully expected top quartile across the board but had a number of 3s as well despite only being unsure about probably <10 questions. The bar of correct questions is clearly high for this exam. Physics is no joke and shouldn't be minimized in light of the radbio ****storm. I highly recommend reading the entire McDermott book and doing all of the end of chapter problems in it before attempting to pound through Raphexes. Don't skim stuff. Spend a few months and consume the whole thing.

I wish there had been a warning that went up last year about radbio. I was caught totally off guard. Looks like there were some hints of it on this forum last year. Hopefully this thread will serve as an official warning to people to taking the exam next year. Our radbio faculty were utterly clueless or didn't care, and the information they had us learn (identical to the same stuff they've been teaching for 20 years) didn't help me with a single question. It makes me ill to think of the hundred hours or so over the past three years we spent memorizing the crap they wanted us to that wasn't tested. I would say it was actually detrimental to our learning. If we had no radbio curriculum at all, I have no doubt I would have done just as well, if not better, because I would have focused more on outside resources instead of what they told us we needed to know to pass the exam.


Maybe physics was deceptively "reasonable". I just found out someone who got an 80% (percentile) on RAPHEX exam this year who failed as bad as I did.

Most programs today don't have actual radiation biology faculty. They just have something to meet the requirement to get a residency.
 
I would agree that programs could reasonably get completely rid of the RadBio curriculum, it has little to no impact on the studying for the exam.

physics course helps kinda maybe but in reality you study for the whole thing Step 1 style and prior course doesn't make a huge difference imo.

I agree with KHE88 that physics should not be taken lightly by any means. I ended up reading most of McDermott as well. would only disagree that I don't think the end of chapter McDermott problems/questions are that helpful compared to RAPHEX, I would prioritize doing a high number of years of tests (like I said I did 7) over doing the end of chapter questions in the text, if you have to choose between the two.

definitely don't only do like 2 or 3 raphex tests if you want to feel super comfortable walking out of the test.

also agree that more people should share their experiences on here, because this is a BIG DEAL, and takes a ton of effort and time.

I don't think there is any other field where people spend this much time DURING residency for a board exam lol.
 
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