AAFP Board Review Study Plan
Started by Slevin
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How to study for ABFM?
Hi Guys, I am trying to gather study material for the ABFM exam. I saw AAFP has a lot materials to buy and people have recommended UW world. I have paper version of ITEs from residency, nothing current. Any feedback would be appreciated. TIA
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I did the audio version, listened to one lecture to and one lecture from work each day. Took the CME credit quiz same day to make sure it stuck.
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For those of you who used the AAFP board study package, do you feel as though it was worth the price? I'm currently considering purchasing it and would love some feedback. Thank you!
As I passed boards and that's the only studying I did, absolutely it was worth it.
I've heard that it's worth it. I personally don't like people reading slides at me, and watched some of the videos/ppt, which is what it seemed like when I watched a few of them. The residents I've talked to that have used it and taken the boards, have all said it has been worth it.
In my opinion it wasn’t worth it. My program gave us the comprehensive notes and they are literally words on a slide. Tons of useless/ stuff you would never be asked. As stated before, old ITEs, free qbank and uworld is more than enough to do great
Thanks for all of the feedback! @VA Hopeful Dr @Ironheme @Fatalis @jm192
I had this question last year when preparing
Background: ended up getting a high score 600-700
for AAFP study package quite time consuming prob take good 2-3 months because of the sheer volume and it’s not like you’re going to absorb all the slides and audio with just one pass. prob need 2-3 passes. What is probably higher yield is to collect all the practice questions from every topic into one file.cover topics considered high yield on the blueprint I.e. msk, resp, cardio only which I believe was over half of the exam
Tips and material used:
your own ITE will be predictive - i got slighlyt higher than my ITE score
blue print was the question breakdown abfm gives us by percentage. Like I said majority of exam msk, resp, cardio
do as many questions as you can and fillin th knowledge gaps along the way
Good skill to develop is doing questions quickly and answering unfamiliar questions. So few days before exam stopped trying to learn new concepts and just did questions 12 hour straight stopping really only to see if
I think the closest approximation was the CKSA app.... i collected the questions and placed in a PowerPoint folder. You get abfm credits and I believe theY are actual old or retired abfm questions
don’t use too much stuff and overwhelm yourself. So I would do too much reading or passive learning.
If there were topics I didn’t understand sometimes I would read afp articles. Typically just the abstract and the clinical bullets in the beginning. Avoid reading as studying as it is passive and not as useful
don’t quote me but pass rate is like high 90s for us residents so passing is in your favor
also for my actual exam don’t remember any repeat questions from the ite, just repeat concepts so don’t spend time memorizing questions. I did the outpatient module which is basically more of the same.
1.Old in training exam - answer keys are invaluable did almost a decade worth. They could ask questions a million different ways for example diabetes meds that help with weight loss, you also reword it and ask diabetic meds that reduce cardiac risk, etc.
2. Collected the CKSA questions into powerpoints - questions approximate exam well
3. AAFP study package questions
Did read some topics that were high yield I believe msk, reps, cardio are the majority of the exam? So I ended up reading the ortho, sports med etc components and topics I was less familiar with such as peds, Er but on the whole didn’t th8nk the slides helped a lot.
4. Also did nejm fam med which was time consuming don’t remember if it helped. But an extra bunch of questions
At the end of the day i wouldn't sweat it too much. I personally felt i over prepared and prob spent too much time but the exam costs over 1000 and you want to get boarded and move on.
Like i said my ITE score was predictive and chances are that you will unlikely fail since failure rate low single digit % and passing rate is high 90 %
Last edited:
thecomeback2019
New Member
do you still have theses powerpoint slides by any chance?
