Hi there,
ABSITE was difficult. It is not like USMLE where you go sit and practice questions for hours on end. In surgery, you don't have that kind of time even with the 80-hour work week. For me, I relied on the experience of the residents ahead of me. Since I am about six months out of medical school, I would not be expected to know the same amount of material on this exam as one of my chief residents who is seven years out.
Here at UVA, our chiefs did prep sessions and quizzed us on a regular basis. Good programs and good mentors force you to adjust your thinking in a critical manner as opposed to forcing you to memorize factoids. Still, there is a certain amount of reading and experience that you have to do for yourself. You can't sit and memorize Sabiston's or Schwartz and think that you are going to ace ABSITE. Some of the questions were judgement questions that needed a level of experience. You will get that experience as you progress along your residency unless you are brain-dead.
Taking the test let me know that my reading was on the right track. This exam pointed my study in a direction that will be most useful as I continue to learn the skills that will make me a good and safe surgeon. Surgery residency is a wonderful mixture of mentorship and self-study. I have been fortunate to find great mentors in my program and I have always had the discipline to study. One is not a subsititute for the other.
The programs who hold ABSITE over your head as a means to measure if you can continue in residency, have the wrong idea. Your performance on a standardized exam on any given day is going to be related to many factors in addition to your knowledge base. Some of us took this exam post-call and sick. The ABSITE is an in-training exam and should let you know, at best, where you can improve your training and study methods. If your program demands a certain score on one exam as opposed to solid growth and day-to-day development, then you have made a critical error in residency selection.
On this year's exam, there were questions that I could answer without hesitation and questions that I had to flip my quarter to pick a letter. I am sure that my chief residents and more senior residents who were sitting in the same room and taking the same test, did not have to rely on that quarter as much as I did.
I would hope that I did well but even if I broke through some magical percentile, my score had less to do with having a knowledge base that enabled me to answer every question with assurance and more to do with the karma on my quarter that I was flipping.
njbmd
