Great job bigtymer. That's a great score. It seems that you studied really hard. You deserve it.
I also passed echo boards last year, though not with such flying colors. The important things to know about the echo boards are:
1) harder exam with lower pass rate than other cardiology exams (nuclear boards, general cardiology boards)
2) it's really not "mandatory" for the vast majority of jobs so failing it is not the end of the world and you can also retake it the next year if you fail. The ASE lets just about anyone sit for the exam but only a cardiologist with at least Level II echo training can call himself/herself "board certified). I do think with the current fairly competitive job market in a lot of areas, it is a good idea to take the exam if you plan to do noninvasive cardiology. If you want to do EP or interventional or CHF, IMHO it's not really necessary, but if you want to take it, go for it. If you want to do academic practice then a lot of the people do take/have taken the echo boards - if you aren't going to be an imaging/echo attending per se, then taking it may be more of an ego thing than a real necessity (academic attendings who are not "echo people" feel free to correct me).
3) I agree w/the comments above, need to study for 2-3 months, ideally. I don't think you need to study all that bigtymer did to just pass the exam, though of course it's laudable. If your program is not strong on congenital stuff, be sure to review the basics of that (i.e. what ventricular septal defects of certain types, and other congenital heart defects, look like on transthoracic echo and TEE). I used both the Klein question book and the Sorrell question book and they were both helpful, though if I had to pick just one I would probably pick Klein. I went through those one time each and then reviewed some of the questions I'd missed again. I own Feigenbaum textbook (have the Oh one but have never liked it b/c I feel like it's too superficial for me to "get it" about important concepts) and did some reviewing from there, especially on questions or concepts I didn't find clear. Just doing these things, I passed the exam with a decent margin, but definitely didn't set the world on fire. If you're a decent test taker, you can probably pass just doing this if your program has pretty good echo training. If you are busy or you have small kid(s), or are in a brutal fellowship this may be all you have time to do. In retrospect I think I could have benefited from more physics review. So, maybe do the 2 questions books I did, and then cram with the physics book recommended by others above.... It's great to study more if you have time, though. I do think the test has a lot of esoteric stuff on it, and I don't think a lot of the test has much to do with day to day skills you need to read echo in the community, but studying for it did make me smarter.
