it was a rough test. much worse i thought than medicine boards, for example, in terms of how vague and tricky and impractical.
there is a good chance i failed despite aggressive studying, and i'm not a perfectionist trying to get a 90% or whatever
day 1 was random, had a number of questions that were trying to trick or just out of left field. long stems, yes, but often the details were just unnecessary. accsap was not a good representation of the questions, because those questions were mostly logical.
day 2 got worse.
ECG was ok, not too bad.
echo was a disaster; half the time it was hard to know what they were even trying to show. too many echo images to flip through in limited time. the echo coding sheet is WAY too extensive to remember all the stupid little diagnoses you're supposed to be coding for.
cath was slightly better than echo. the views they would show were POOR (poor contrast injection, incomplete views, didn't help to go frame by frame) which is not how things are done in practice, yet they want you grading severity based on poor views.
the fact that the pass rate dropped last year (86% last year and under 90% for the first time in years, with something like a 6 point drop in pass rate vs. the prior year) just fits with the very unreasonable nature of the images on day 2. it seems to me that they WANT people to fail to keep the pass rates low.
maybe i'm just supremely dumb. did others feel this way? is this how people's experience was in previous years?
my understanding is that you have to pass both day 1 AND day 2 to pass the test, but for day 2, the ECG and imaging score is combined. so that if you do poorly on imaging you can make it up with a good score on ECG. is this correct?
