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Agreed. Now orals on the other hand...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...4 months is too much. Depending on how much time/day you're devoting to it, 1.5-2.5 months is enough.
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!
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.
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.
Ugh. All that info as useful to us as clinicians as the anatomy of the recurrent laryngeal nerve was to Luciano Pavarotti.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)?
Any thoughts on today's test???
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...
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.
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.These exams should test core competency - does this person understand the basic radiation physics and biology needed to be a competent clinician?
Anyone have an idea when the exam results come out?
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).
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.
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.
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.
Can people who passed post how they studied and what their breakdowns were? Asking for a friend...
I am genuinely curious - what kinds of RadBio questions were on the test that people felt were unwarranted?
I am genuinely curious - what kinds of RadBio questions were on the test that people felt were unwarranted?
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.