Failed ABEM Oral Boards 2021

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If you've finished Okuda and want to go over more cases, I thought First Aid for the EM Oral Boards was pretty good.
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The oral boards is the medicine equivalent of going to a shootout to decide who wins a game. It's a small subset of the actual experience, it gives outsized influence to people that are very good or very bad at that subset, and regardless of the outcome it ends up feeling arbitrary to most people involved in it.

The alternative of actually having an exam that proved your ability to competently handle multiple patients of vastly different acuities while the ED implodes in fire and unscheduled EPIC downtime while not saying or doing anything that's going to get you dragged before peer review would reveal that there's an upsetting number of EM grads that can't do the job for which they trained.
 
I don't know why everyone takes issue with this exam. It's really a fine exam.

We practiced for it 2-3x/yr in residency.

My prep was Okuda by myself. I went through each case simulating in my head what I would say and do.

I felt like all of my exam cases were some variant of an Okuda case. Extremely bread and butter EM.
 
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So I didn't want to post until I actually passed the exam so here we go.
I failed the March exam but I was able to get an assignment for the June exam about 2.5 weeks prior (after being waitlist for all the possible dates and I checked the box that I did not mind being assigned just a few days before - I would request these tests days off in advance so that I don't have to scramble to ask for schedule change)

I passed I did both the books and oral board course. I did Okuda and AAEM course the first time around and I did First Aid and ICEP the second time around. I think First Aid book really helped. Although the material is outdated, it does give a breakdown of the scores, why you would score high or low in the cases. I vouch for ICEP (Illinois college of emergency physicians) oral board prep course because they teach you how to approach the test and also give you scores too. It's better than AAEM one in my opinion (yes, I spent fortunes on this test because I am a very nervous wreck during these simulated tests).
 
They want you to follow an algorithm just like a NP. Just follow the script, and don't leave anything out. Having some acting experience makes it easier. Some may benefit from a beta blocker.
 
I failed by 0.1 point, taken aback. I did really well with AAEM course. Planning to taking it again. Anyone needing to retake the exam got another spot?
 
Its absolutely asinine that this is a required exam in the first place, but only offering a required exam to be board certified so infrequently is beyond ridiculous.
 
GonnaBeADoc2222 said:
I do not agree that it's a useless exam. There's a format to be learned, yes, but once you know it, it becomes a test of clinical knowledge and organization.
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Yeah, I don't agree that it's useless either. Actually, I thought that the ABEM oral boards were one of the better "tests" in the medicine that I ran across. Painful, but useful. In fact, if given the option, I'd rather see ABEM drop the written test and expand the oral boards a bit. Its one of the few tests as you progress that measures your ability to apply information well, not just memorize it.
 
Old_Mil said:
Yeah, I don't agree that it's useless either. Actually, I thought that the ABEM oral boards were one of the better "tests" in the medicine that I ran across. Painful, but useful. In fact, if given the option, I'd rather see ABEM drop the written test and expand the oral boards a bit. Its one of the few tests as you progress that measures your ability to apply information well, not just memorize it.
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Im flabbergasted that anyone thinks this exam is useful. Apply the information? What the hell is constantly being evaluated in residency for? How we can support this exam while being outcompeted by midlevels with 1/10 of our training and testing is beyond my comprehension.
 
It's not "useless" in terms of it actually tests your ability to think on your feet and multitask without a quick-reference guide like WikEM at your fingertips. That much, I'll concede.

How the exam is actually implemented, though... Yeah, it leaves a lot to be desired.

The only reason we are "outcompeted" by PLPs is corporate greed. Period.

I boast that my "esoteric EM knowledge" is STOUT and will gladly play *Trivial Pursuit: EM Edition* with anyone on here. That's not what the oral boards are looking for.
 
sylvanthus said:
Im flabbergasted that anyone thinks this exam is useful. Apply the information? What the hell is constantly being evaluated in residency for? How we can support this exam while being outcompeted by midlevels with 1/10 of our training and testing is beyond my comprehension.
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ABEM general is also the most unbelievably contrived hospital. One simultaneously has access to all sorts of imaging and consultants while these resources are invariably unavailable, refusing to provide their professional services, or deferring to someone with much less skill.

There should really be two practice environments, ABEM ivory tower and ABEM level Nth trauma center in the most critical of access locations.

At ABEM ivory tower resources would be available as expected, while at ABEM Mount St. elsewhere (nee, Our Dear Lady of Neglect and Decubitus Ulcers), you would be the only doctor in house having to deliver a baby, respond to a floor code, read your own films, do all your own procedures, and reassure nurses that rounding up from 15 mg/kg to 15.0001 mg/kg of acetaminophen is perfectly acceptable in pediatric patients.
 
Also the visual aids / stimuli are absolute garbage. In this day and age, with the money they're making from the test, you'd think they'd provide a better copy of a head CT than one that's a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy to the nth degree. They should really be ashamed. I'd rather they just pulled a crayola drawing of some dude's brain off the fridge, it'd probably be just as ambiguous.
 
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Tipsy McStagger said:
Also the visual aids / stimuli are absolute garbage. In this day and age, with the money they're making from the test, you'd think they'd provide a better copy of a head CT than one that's a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy to the nth degree. They should really be ashamed. I'd rather they just pulled a crayola drawing of some dude's brain off the fridge, it'd probably be just as ambiguous.
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I think they've improved their quality with the cases where you can use the computer (I forget their name).

This is a complete aside, but when I took the oral boards, one of my cases was almost a complete copy of one of the sample cases that they had in the lobby practice room the day before. I thought it was super bizarre, but there were no complaints from me.
 
SWOOt said:
I failed by 0.1 point, taken aback. I did really well with AAEM course. Planning to taking it again. Anyone needing to retake the exam got another spot?
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Any luck getting a spot?
 
lingu1a said:
I think this subject has annoyed me the most - there are some pretty significantly conflicting recommendations for approaching these cases and most of what you're given is passed down during residency. Some say IV, O2, Monitor for every patient, others say don't shotgun this if they're not hypoxic. We were always taught to say "What do I hear/see/smell when I walk in the room?" but Okuda list a "Primary Survey" - does this mean I need to ask about the airway, secretions, gag reflex, breathing, circulation for every patient or is this the "What do I hear/see/smell?" Some say if you don't talk to EMS or family you're going to fail, others say they never did that and passed. Some say GU/rectal on every patient, no matter the complaint - is this really representative of what we do on a daily basis? Some resources say not to interpret labs or imagining out loud but ABEM's video example does this. In the example video he just asks "HEENT?, Abdomen?" whereas some people will say the examiners want you to ask specifics.

I watched the example ABEM has on their site so. many. times. I feel like I had good rapport with almost all the examiners, never felt like I got the "cues" some resources say you'll get from the examiner that you're doing something abnormal or running out of time. I had a plan, I practiced with multiple people, I had checkboxes to not forget all aspects of the physical, I reevaluated, I updated the family, I asked EMS to stick around. I honestly don't know what went wrong, but here I am another $1,300 poorer hoping another seat comes up sooner rather than later.
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Any luck getting the exam rescheduled ?
 
lingu1a said:
Similar to other "Failed Oral Boards" threads, I'm of course taken aback. I did all of Okuda (which contains a fair amount of out of date material), had a fair amount of oral boards prep in residency and practiced a lot before with others, had a strategy going in, etc. It appears it just wasn't my day. Passed the written exam fine. I'll likely do AAEMs course.

However, ABEM said another seat could be up to 2 years away...

For anyone that failed in the March 2021 group, have you received a seat assignment yet? Or any communication from ABEM, for that matter? Having this delayed to due COVID and now hanging over my head for up to another two years is honestly the worst part.

Having absolutely no feedback is also pretty terrible. Did I fail the new Structured Interview? Was I terrible at Data Acquisition? Did I miss a Critical Action? Who knows.
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were you able to snag a spot sooner? I saw there is a waitlist you can add yourself to!
 
Does anyone know the general ballpark of the dates for 2022 exams? Is it going to be April and October?
 
Anyone else who recently took the exam have their ABEM website update with CME and LLSA info?
 
Copied from the other oral board thread:

Fair warning to all. I failed by .04 points. Colleagues passed by .01-.05 points. I am by all accounts a competent and well liked ER doc who trained at a solid program, and I was prepared. I did Okuda, went overboard and did a review course, and they predicted I would do well. Practiced with friends. Exam day went great. I “played the game”. There were no curveballs, all very straightforward stuff; bread and butter things I care for on a daily or weekly basis. I was organized and had a system. All patients were treated and dispositioned appropriately. Finished the test feeling dumb for having prepared so much for it. There was literally nothing I would have (at the time) done differently to prepare. Then came the shocking failure email. I’ve never been so blindsided by anything.

I just wanted to share. I’m someone this “shouldn’t have happened to”. But it did. I’m confident I can prepare and pass my next attempt. But I’d be lying if I said this hasn’t been a gut punch and made me regret even more getting into this ever deteriorating specialty.
 
daliresp said:
Copied from the other oral board thread:

Fair warning to all. I failed by .04 points. Colleagues passed by .01-.05 points. I am by all accounts a competent and well liked ER doc who trained at a solid program, and I was prepared. I did Okuda, went overboard and did a review course, and they predicted I would do well. Practiced with friends. Exam day went great. I “played the game”. There were no curveballs, all very straightforward stuff; bread and butter things I care for on a daily or weekly basis. I was organized and had a system. All patients were treated and dispositioned appropriately. Finished the test feeling dumb for having prepared so much for it. There was literally nothing I would have (at the time) done differently to prepare. Then came the shocking failure email. I’ve never been so blindsided by anything.

I just wanted to share. I’m someone this “shouldn’t have happened to”. But it did. I’m confident I can prepare and pass my next attempt. But I’d be lying if I said this hasn’t been a gut punch and made me regret even more getting into this ever deteriorating specialty.
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Bummer, the whole concept is BS but unfortunately entirely necessary for one's career...
 
daliresp said:
Copied from the other oral board thread:

Fair warning to all. I failed by .04 points. Colleagues passed by .01-.05 points. I am by all accounts a competent and well liked ER doc who trained at a solid program, and I was prepared. I did Okuda, went overboard and did a review course, and they predicted I would do well. Practiced with friends. Exam day went great. I “played the game”. There were no curveballs, all very straightforward stuff; bread and butter things I care for on a daily or weekly basis. I was organized and had a system. All patients were treated and dispositioned appropriately. Finished the test feeling dumb for having prepared so much for it. There was literally nothing I would have (at the time) done differently to prepare. Then came the shocking failure email. I’ve never been so blindsided by anything.

I just wanted to share. I’m someone this “shouldn’t have happened to”. But it did. I’m confident I can prepare and pass my next attempt. But I’d be lying if I said this hasn’t been a gut punch and made me regret even more getting into this ever deteriorating specialty.
Click to expand...
Wanted to update since there’s so little info out there on this subject. I passed with a 5.6 (passing 5.25) with almost zero additional prep. I was given 3 days notice to get in off the waitlist. I was never able to identify what I did to fail the first time. I felt I actually did better on my first attempt. Overall, the process of failing and then having to waitlist into an exam was horrible. I am so sorry for the folks that have to endure it, and I hope ABEM does something to change.
 
daliresp said:
Wanted to update since there’s so little info out there on this subject. I passed with a 5.6 (passing 5.25) with almost zero additional prep. I was given 3 days notice to get in off the waitlist. I was never able to identify what I did to fail the first time. I felt I actually did better on my first attempt. Overall, the process of failing and then having to waitlist into an exam was horrible. I am so sorry for the folks that have to endure it, and I hope ABEM does something to change.
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Glad you passed and got this behind you. I think some people get really hung up on the management/diagnosis/disposition component of the oral boards which is relatively minor. It's all about that sheet with all the items that need to be checked. I can't remember if that was on the board website or if my board review course gave it to me but it's all a game and you have to keep the checklist in your head during each case and force yourself to mention/address each item. Luckily you don't ever have to worry about it again.
 
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