Board Certification in Psychiatry

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The stand alone questions where single answer and that is half of the test. Then in the vignette section I found the regular clinical vignettes, a few with videos, and some were what I call short vignettes -just short introduction- Those might be the non vignette then. But I only had a few of those.
 
i thought the vignettes were terrible and i am scared i will fail because of them. 🙁 12 weeks of waiting sucks
 
Pijiriguo said:
The stand alone questions where single answer and that is half of the test. Then in the vignette section I found the regular clinical vignettes, a few with videos, and some were what I call short vignettes -just short introduction- Those might be the non vignette then. But I only had a few of those.
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I think you are confusing "multiple choice" with questions that had multiple answers you had to pick. A multiple choice question is one that has multiple choices from which you pick one. The stand alone questions are the non-vignette, multiple choice questions.
 
For me I don't know how I'll deal with the embarrassment of failure because most people I work with think highly of me and we're all like 'oh it'll be a piece of cake for you'...the shame will be so rough.
 
Regarding Beat The Boards:

I think it gets a bum rap because folks expect to walk away prepared for the boards.

For folks considering BTB: it is training that comes in and teaches you pretty much everything you need to know at a superficial level. This is great if you trained somewhere that you worried about didactic quality or where you didn't get broad enough clinical exposure. It's also great even if you had all of this but have a memory like a goldfish and wanted a refresher (raises hand).

But BTB does not take the place of doing questions. No course does. BTB and courses like it provide a framework, but you'll need to build on it with question banks. I didn't do Board Vitals but loved Spiegel and saw multiple questions on the test that we're practically lifted from it. If you do all 900 questions, read the explanations, study them, and add them to your growing framework (whatever that might be), you'll likely do fine.

But BTB is didactic, which makes it passive learning, which is no replacement for doing the questions. Not saying it's a bad thing. I'm glad I did it. But the course won't replace the questions later.
 
Good luck to everyone waiting. The pass rate is like 90% and the consequence of failure is just swallowed pride and repeating the test. I know for me it would be a lot easier the second time around.
 
The 12 week thing is good, by the way. Tehran review the test question by question and look for bad questions to toss out based on performance parameters. And there were a lot of badly phrased questions.
 
Pijiriguo said:
Agree. All the blocks were 60 but I was offered a break every time I finish a block and I did not do any block back to back
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WingedOx said:
yeah, pretty sure you got one between every section and could use the 50 min however you wanted.
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Hmm; maybe there was something wrong with my test then, because I definitely had only 6 breaks to use between a total of 8 blocks. Maybe I should contact the board and let them know? I forgot to mention it in my comments on the survey at the end.

I was tempted to just use extra break time beyond the 50 min and let it eat into my test time. I think I'm still conditioned from running out of time on step 3 to answering questions faster than I need to. I had a lot of time on the end.
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Me too. Once I realized how my extra time I was going to have, I started trying to pace myself more, but still wound up finishing early because I thought "screw it, there's no point in continuing to review block 8 for an entire hour."

Also, I'd prefer not to violate the nondisclosure agreement, but did anyone else think a certain subset of disorders was way over-tested on the vignettes compared to how often they occur in real life... or has everyone lost all their memory of such events?
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Heheh. I had exactly the same thought. And nice way of alluding to it.

WingedOx said:
Yeah, there was that, and there also were "pick two" question where you'd think "well, there's one clear answer here that I'd do 100% of the time in clinical practice, but there's also apparently another one... should I inappropriately prescribe a benzo or inappropriately prescribe an expensive antipsychotic as my second choice?"
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Yes, and in addition to those, there was at least one where one thing I would definitely do in clinical practice wasn't even an answer choice.
 
Does anybody know how many questions they take into account for the final grading? I know that for IM board the results are based on about 205 out of 240 questions and they give you a score on a scale 200 to 800 in which more than 366 is usually pass. How does this work for psych?
 
i'm not sure what you mean 205 out of 240 questions...like they throw out 35 questions before grading the IM boards?
 
Yes. Some questions are taking out due to mistakes and others are just in the test for research to use in future tests.
 
and how are the multiple answer questions scored? do they require you to get both correct for credit (and therefore getting one of two is the same as getting neither correct)?
 
americanidiot said:
back to cramming erickson/mahler/piaget stages and CYP inhibitors/inducers (a successful ritual for me before literally every medical board exam as i can NEVER remember them for longer than 24 hours).
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Which makes me wonder why these exam designers think they're so important. Who can keep these things memorized? 3A4, 2D6, 1A2... they're just random letters and numbers. Are there really that many docs out there with the photographic memory that would be required to keep them all straight?

notdeadyet said:
Regarding Beat The Boards:

I think it gets a bum rap because folks expect to walk away prepared for the boards.

For folks considering BTB: it is training that comes in and teaches you pretty much everything you need to know at a superficial level. This is great if you trained somewhere that you worried about didactic quality or where you didn't get broad enough clinical exposure. It's also great even if you had all of this but have a memory like a goldfish and wanted a refresher (raises hand).

But BTB does not take the place of doing questions. No course does. BTB and courses like it provide a framework, but you'll need to build on it with question banks. I didn't do Board Vitals but loved Spiegel and saw multiple questions on the test that we're practically lifted from it. If you do all 900 questions, read the explanations, study them, and add them to your growing framework (whatever that might be), you'll likely do fine.

But BTB is didactic, which makes it passive learning, which is no replacement for doing the questions. Not saying it's a bad thing. I'm glad I did it. But the course won't replace the questions later.
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But BTB has a question bank, too. I assumed the people complaining about BTB were complaining about the whole thing, including the questions. I agree that Spiegel seemed like good preparation; can't comment on the BTB questions since I only did a couple blocks of them.
 
WingedOx said:
and how are the multiple answer questions scored? do they require you to get both correct for credit (and therefore getting one of two is the same as getting neither correct)?
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Yes, you've got to get them all right to get credit. So if they ask for 3 out of whatever, you've got to get all 3 right. Once again, the vignettes are stupid.
 
Can someone explain the rationale behind the 12 week waiting period? Surely they can compute whether you're in the ballpark of passing just from the raw score...I get there is considerable statistical and content maneuvering that takes place but yikes 3 months is a long time.
 
Trismegistus4 said:
But BTB has a question bank, too. I assumed the people complaining about BTB were complaining about the whole thing, including the questions. I agree that Spiegel seemed like good preparation; can't comment on the BTB questions since I only did a couple blocks of them.
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Makes sense. I think I'd recommend that folks make a very big distinction between real question banks (that have explanations and rationales with the answers, like Spiegeleisen and I assume Board Vitals) and questions without explanations (like the ones included in the BTB didactics and the PRITEs. The latter is pretty limited learning. The former is actually pretty effective because the explanations trigger memories of non-associated wrong answers.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I took Beat the Boards and completed their QBank. They also provide explanation to all questions; however, there were many questions in the test that I would not have been able to answer just with BTB. Thankfully they were covered in Spiegel with very good explanations -pharm, weird metabolic disease, side effects-.
 
Pijiriguo said:
I took Beat the Boards and completed their QBank. They also provide explanation to all questions; however, there were many questions in the test that I would not have been able to answer just with BTB. Thankfully they were covered in Spiegel with very good explanations -pharm, weird metabolic disease, side effects-.
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Were you glad you took Beat the Boards for the didactic/framework component, or do you view it as a waste?
 
americanidiot said:
Can someone explain the rationale behind the 12 week waiting period? Surely they can compute whether you're in the ballpark of passing just from the raw score...I get there is considerable statistical and content maneuvering that takes place but yikes 3 months is a long time.
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12 weeks is probably an outlier. Historically, scores went out earlier than they did last year where we really did hit 12 weeks. 8 weeks is probably within the realm of possible. It likely depends on what the initial scores look like.
 
notdeadyet said:
Were you glad you took Beat the Boards for the didactic/framework component, or do you view it as a waste?
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I am glad I took it. I think that for board preparation they both complement each other.
 
Congrats on being done everyone. Interesting perspectives. I did Spiegel and Board Vitals and have to say after taking the test that I found way more questions on the exam to be similar to BVs versus Speigel. Both were extremely helpful but if I had to go back and just get one, in hindsight I would have just done BV. Vignettes on the exam were totally random. I still found some of those "multiple select" questions on the exam to be ridiculously tricky, pick 2 when I wanted to pick 3, etc. and not educational or good ways to test a psychiatrists knowledge accurately. I guess it's the ABPN's replacement for the old oral exams?
 
asdf0987 said:
Congrats on being done everyone. Interesting perspectives. I did Spiegel and Board Vitals and have to say after taking the test that I found way more questions on the exam to be similar to BVs versus Speigel. Both were extremely helpful but if I had to go back and just get one, in hindsight I would have just done BV. Vignettes on the exam were totally random. I still found some of those "multiple select" questions on the exam to be ridiculously tricky, pick 2 when I wanted to pick 3, etc. and not educational or good ways to test a psychiatrists knowledge accurately. I guess it's the ABPN's replacement for the old oral exams?
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Interesting -- I took the exam last year, but I really felt like Spiegel was the closest. BV seemed to get a little too caught on small details, even more so than Spiegel. Maybe they've improved it, though -- they were really receptive to feedback. Yeah, the vignettes are supposed to capture what the orals would capture. Of course you really can't create a multiple choice exam that would match actually talking through and presenting a case with someone else.
 
Doctor Bagel said:
Interesting -- I took the exam last year, but I really felt like Spiegel was the closest. BV seemed to get a little too caught on small details, even more so than Spiegel. Maybe they've improved it, though -- they were really receptive to feedback. Yeah, the vignettes are supposed to capture what the orals would capture. Of course you really can't create a multiple choice exam that would match actually talking through and presenting a case with someone else.
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Yeah, it seems like they must have done something, it was spot on.
 
Unfortunately I did not have same experience with Board Vitals. I did about 40% of their QBank and many questions were extremely low yield. Some questions were to much into medicine. Neuro was in detail to the point of being confusing and not representative of what I saw in boards. I also found a few mistakes therefore I stopped and moved to repeat BTB and Spiegel. But maybe the good questions were among the once I did not do... Who knows.
 
Wow, so many varying opinions. I'm definitely going to do Spiegel, at least 2 or 3 times through, but now the questions is should I do board vitals or BTB? Anyone else with any other opinions??
 
PistolPete said:
Wow, so many varying opinions. I'm definitely going to do Spiegel, at least 2 or 3 times through, but now the questions is should I do board vitals or BTB? Anyone else with any other opinions??
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Unless Spiegel adds video vignettes its probably a good idea to do the video vignettes from Board Vitals just to acclimate to the real exam.
 
To be honest, I don't know that specific vignette practice is necessary. You'll hear a lot of folks gripe about the vignettes (me among them), but it's nothing specific to the format as much as the fact that the vignettes use actors of various authenticity and ask "pick three of the five" type questions which are subjective and poorly worded. I definitely wasn't happy with them, but more practice wouldn't have helped. I'd just focus more on learning the objective material.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
There were only few video vignettes in the exam and I don't think you need specific preparation for that. You just have to listen and watch the video. I don't think there is specific or best way to prepare for vignettes other that studying. I think what I learned in BTB and Spiegel overall helped... Like risk factors, predictors of prognosis, general management, appropriate psycotherapies, etc. Also, please don't freak out about timing; read carefully and take some time. I took some extra time for vignette blocks-maybe 10 more mins per block- and I still had plenty of time for stand alone since they were very short and straight forward.
 
I thought Board Vitals was helpful. Not so much as a representation of the actual exam, but it helps get you in the right frame of mind for test taking. I did a 3 month subscription of psych, psych vignettes, and neuro. If you have the dedicated time and motivation 1 month would be plenty. I finished all of the psych, did about half of the vignettes and barely touched the neuro. So, if I had it to over again I would just get the psych. I used Board Vitals as a complement to the Beat the Boards stuff. I get anxious over these exams and a way of dealing with that anxiety is through doing lots of questions. I did not feel the BTB question bank had enough questions so added Board Vitals. I thought reading the explanations of the BV stuff was good use of study time. I think I purchased the vignettes out of fear of the unknown. But I think a previous poster hit the nail on the head...there really is no best way to practice for the vignettes. It is really about symptom recognition and management. Now having said that, I thought managing the timing on these things was tricky. I spent way too much on them and started to feel like I was running out of time midway through the exam. I was able to make up for the excess time I spent on the vignettes with the stand alone MCQ's. The fact that you have to manage ALL of the time instead of individual blocks of time should not be taken lightly. The last week of my prep I spent doing the Spiegel book. I agree with other posters who feel it is the closest to the tone and feel of the actual exam. After I took the exam, last Friday, I was drained and a little shell shocked and having just taken this beast of a test, but I could not say there is anything else I would have done differently to prepare. You can always do more neuro or hit pharm till you know it absolutely cold (which I do not), but all in all, I think BTB, BV, and Spiegel give you everything you need.

And now just think, after today, only 11 more weeks till I find out if I passed this thing. Quite possibly the worst part of the whole experience. May the curve be with us all.
 
as of 2014, you are not required to pass neuro independently...they use the grand total. i found this out 2 days before the exam. another fact is that sleep and memory disorders count for half of the neuro points according to the official sources if I am not mistaken.
 
TXpsydoc said:
as of 2014, you are not required to pass neuro independently...they use the grand total. i found this out 2 days before the exam. another fact is that sleep and memory disorders count for half of the neuro points according to the official sources if I am not mistaken.
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Oh, thank god
 
Board Vitals vignettes were good for practice but much of the explanation and answer content was flawed. I found s their opinions and questions s about affect or psychotic behaviors for example to be far more vague that the actual board questions. That said there maybe 10 percent of what they covered reflected in boards. Then the charged me for an additional month after boards were over. Refunded with some weird excuse. Don't find them high quite. Whereas Kenny Spiegel hit the nail. So grateful for the book and online questions.
 
How do we know when results are available? Do they send you an email to log into folio and check results?
 
Pijiriguo said:
How do we know when results are available? Do they send you an email to log into folio and check results?
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They send you an email. However, the email came out a couple of hours after you could check on the website to see if you passed. The trick for that is to search for your name under board certified people -- that will pop up earlier in the day before you get your email.
 
Doctor Bagel said:
They send you an email. However, the email came out a couple of hours after you could check on the website to see if you passed. The trick for that is to search for your name under board certified people -- that will pop up earlier in the day before you get your email.
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So should I check on 12/24 or earlier?
 
americanidiot said:
According to the sheet they gave at the end of the exam, scores will be available 12 weeks from the final day of testing so we should know by 12/18/15.
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But there's always a possibility they will be available early, so you should check that website everyday. 🙂 Actually I suspect they'll be a little early but who knows. Ours were out by I think Dec. 10. In past years, they had been out by late November.
 
Doctor Bagel said:
But there's always a possibility they will be available early, so you should check that website everyday. 🙂 Actually I suspect they'll be a little early but who knows. Ours were out by I think Dec. 10. In past years, they had been out by late November.
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If I had the time to resurrect my programming skills, I'd write a web app that would automatically check every day for you and email you when there was a result. It would be a trivial exercise for one who knew web programming.
 
Doctor Bagel said:
But there's always a possibility they will be available early, so you should check that website everyday. 🙂 Actually I suspect they'll be a little early but who knows. Ours were out by I think Dec. 10. In past years, they had been out by late November.
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This year our IM friends found out <8 weeks from the last day of testing...I guess their exam is less in flux than ours...
 
Yes, we did. I am a Med Psych and I took the IM as well. I passed that one and now waiting...
 
Got a link today on my ABPN page - Apply for examination.
It's scary
 
@Rena i wouldn't worry about that. its been <6 weeks since the final day of testing. besides i think that happens every year.
 
Just read previous posts. People were speculating last year what did it mean if you can chose sub-specialty exam and for initial certification it saya that more information needed
 
Yeah as I remember from reading those old threads I don't think there was any evidence of correlation between passing/failing and those options... For what it's worth I have the 'need more info' after clicking initial application link. I have an option to apply for brain injury medicine under the 'apply for an examination'.
 
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