I took it for the first time yesterday as an intern, our program has us take it as a trial run but emphasizes that none of us should study for it. I took them at their word and did not study anything at all in preparation. I was surprised by how short the questions were, I guess I am used to USMLE-style paragraphs. There were some questions that I knew right away, some I could figure out by process of elimination, and some that I had no idea on. I thought I would have no idea on most of them, so I was surprised at how many I could at least make an educated guess on. The questions were mostly straightforward and I left feeling like I could look up the answers to the ones I didn't know pretty easily. That being said, I am not looking forward to starting board prep, which I had always planned on putting off until after I had taken the ITE once. A handful of the questions had nothing to do with anesthesiology per se, which ironically were probably the ones I was most comfortable with from step 3 (ethics, statistics, etc).
My question is how many versions of the test are given each year? Are CA-1's taking the same test as the CA-3's? Just curious since I am new to this ITE business.