core study schedule help

[radrad5]

hello all -

i was hoping some former core exam takers could share their study schedule.

i'm having difficulty creating my own schedule, and think it would be helpful to know how others have approached this monster process in the past

i have a general idea of what i want to accomplish on a month-by-month basis, but find it hard to plan on week-by-week or day-to-day without knowing how long it will even take me to make my first pass thru CTC or war machine etc

any advice or insight is much appreciated!

thanks!

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[EPV213]

Multiple ways to skin the cat. I read around 4 core review series books during January and February focused on weak subjects (nucs,chest,MSK,IR). Did my first pass through CTC in March then War Machine early April and then focused on Board Vitals and re-read my weak sections on CTC. I wish I had maybe gone through CTC earlier but ended up doing just fine. Don’t underestimate NIS pamphlet my worst section on the test. Would read at least 4 times tbh.

 

[guytakingboards]

The answer of course is: it depends.

How many resources do you want to get through and how many repeat passes of each (if any)? How many questions (/banks) do you plan to do? How many hours per day can you study? Do you have any dedicated time where you can blow out 10+ hrs per day?

What kind of baseline knowledge do you already have? if you've been studying consistently and have already read Core Radiology cover to cover then CtC isn't going to be hard to get through.

A rule of thumb people in my program were saying when i took the core half a decade ago was 3 passes of CtC. First pass: 3mo, Second pass: 3 weeks, 3rd pass: 3 days. I personally didn't use that method but many people did and were pretty successful with that. (who knows what secondary resources they used and how many questions they did though).

I think you just need to start studying and then you'll get an idea of how long that first pass of CtC will take. Everything else should fall in line.

 

[Cognovi]

I bought CTC and didn't open it until the day of my exam. I felt bad that I had just used it as a monitor stand for the past 6 months and decided I needed to flip through a few pages to justify spending the money that I will never fully recoup.

I didn't have a regimented study schedule because I felt my baseline knowledge and steady, albeit scattered, studying would suffice. I did a few hundred practice questions in Board Vitals over the course of two months, attended the RadDiscord review sessions nearly weekly in the several months leading up, attended the review lectures my program faculty put on for us in the few months leading up, attended the virtual intensive review two day course that our regional Roentgen Ray Society put on, made Anki cards out of most things I took notes on from AIRP, edited Radiopaedia, attended the Sensakovic physics review course that was like a week during the spring, made Anki cards out of the NIS booklet, and made Anki cards for the RISE questions based on an AJR article (doi: 10.2214/AJR.14.13283) and whatever I got wrong in Board Vitals.