Well, the ABSITE was today! It actually was not nearly as bad as I expected (I'm an intern). I didn't study nearly as much as I had hoped - I basically read about 2/3 of "The Absite Review" (I highly recommend), and 2/3 of "Absite Killer," (I ran out of time to finish reading both of these). My program also provided the residents with a subscription to absite.org, and I read the notes available there and did a handful of questions. I don't know how much this site normally costs, but it was of moderate value. I saw about 3 questions on the exam that were basically word for word from the absite.org practice questions, and I had only done about 45 of them. Some of the key facts in "Absite Killer" are labeled as "every year," and many of these did appear.
Frankly I thought the Surgery SHELF exam was far more difficult when I took that. Many questions were very easy and straightforward, a few were very specific and I'm not sure any amount of studying would have helped, and most just required a little bit of thought. Each question had 5 choices. I would say of the 225 questions, I had no clue on about 10-15 of them, and could only narrow down to 2-3 choices on another 25-30. I really felt that most of the questions I likely missed were ones that were too specific for studying to make much difference, i.e. either you know it or you don't, such as the fact that Question: Gleevec blocks the action of Answer: c-kit, which I happened to know only because we pondered using it to treat a patient of my mine with a rare tumor in Med School. I felt very good after the test, but I'm not sure if I will be able to improve much next year...
Does anyone have a sense of what percentage of questions answered correctly generally corresponds with what percentile performance?
