General hints for shelf exams

[quixote1974]

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Can anyone give any general hints for answering the shelf exam questions? Especially how to study for and answer those "what's the next best step in management...." questions.

Thanks.

 

[michigan]

It kind of depends on what shelf you are talking about. Here's some general hints though:
NMS, Blueprints, PreTest. I really like Blueprints because it's 'readable'. PreTest will prepare you the most for the kind of management questions you asked about. A great deal of these questions are just recognizing what disease is present, just like on 2nd year exams, but then going the next step into management. So far I have taken the Family, Peds and Med shelf, any questions about these in particular? Another strategy is to be well read on your patients in the rotation from a major text, or something like Cecils or Nelson's Essentials, and then using a review book to fill in the blanks of things you didn't see on your clerkship.

 

[GO_MEDPEDS]

This is what has worked for me...

1. Get yourself a Palm (Sony, Ipaq, whatever)
2. Get the following programs: 5-Minute Clinical Consult, a dictionary (Stedman's is big but great, Taber's is more concise), strongly consider Outlines in Clinical Medicine, and E-Pocrates.
3. On every patient you have, hear about, etc., use these programs to learn the following: a basic summary of the disease, important signs and symptoms, how you diagnose it, how you treat it... (5-Minute Clinical Consult format). Make a notecard or cheat sheet with a quick and dirty summary of these. I have really found this helps for those "what to do next questions" because that's how you learn it.
4. In addition, use your memopad on the palm to jot down notes and pearls that you think is useful.
5. This prepares you fairly well to do quite a bit of learning when unable to actually sit down and study, and it also reinforces your learning by looking up the information right away!
6. When your day is done, or when you have free time with computer access, go to uptodate.com or emedicine.com and look up some of the biggest topics (i.e. Heart Disease for Medicine, Acute Abdomen for Surgery, Preeclampsia for OB/GYN) and print these off to read. These will also have good information for what to do next and are great ways of providing the most up-to-date information for impressing your residents/attendings.
7. The only studying I would do besides this is to do lots and lots of questions... Pretest, Appleton and Lange, or NMS are usually decent. I then use my palm programs or review book to look up topics I seem particularly weak in.

Essentially, I try and do most of my studying by learning on the go. I then check what I've learned by doing the questions. I really find it much easier to use the palm and online sources than to use the large textbooks, which take forever to search and read. Learning as I go also allows me to have more goof off/sleep time, which is also much appreciated!

Well, I hope that helps... Let me know if you have any questions about my odd studying habits!

 

[PediaSure]

The best way for me to prepare for shelf exams was to read about my patients as well as patients of other students on the team. If you read at least 2-3 hours daily, then you should be ok. Of course, cramming is possible. A lot of students do it. But studying the length of your rotations while you have residents and attendings to help is best in the long run. Remember, you have to remember this stuff for Step 2!! Also, find a good question book. Start on questions at least 2 weeks before the exam. OB/GYN, Medicine, and Peds are pretty straight forward. Be forewarned that a lot of the surgery exam is Medicine. i.e you should know what to do if a surgical pt has CAD,COPD, DM, etc. The FP exam can be difficult if you take it first cuz FP encompasses medicine, peds, and ob. And exams have been known to be one subject area heavy. Psych exam is pretty straight forward also. Just remember to study addictive drugs and the pharmacology.

Also, when you are sitting around the lounge waiting for the next patient to come in, bounce questions off the other studs. It also helps the old 'noggin remember things because it is more active.

MedPeds,
sounds like a good game plan...Has it worked for you so far? I think your method will become more and more used as palms and pocket pcs increase in popularity each year.

 

[GO_MEDPEDS]

Yep, it's worked really well... lowest test grade was a High Pass (stupid Psych!). Yes, for Psych, I highly recommend using the pocket DSM-IV to review the major criteria for the common psychiatric illnesses... It really seemed like the most painful questions were ones in which you had to distingiush between delirium, acute psychosis, dementia, etc. as well as behavioral disorders. The other tests seemed much more like standard medical tests... I agree that the Family Practice test was difficult because of the culmination of knowledge required, but the biggest help will be if you've had Medicine prior (that's almost 90% of the test anyway).

Anyway, I really do think it's worth the money to buy a good PDA and load it up with the programs I mentioned before... it's just so much more convenient and efficient, especially because you will find yourself looking up things that you would have blown off before or forgot to look up when you went home. At first I thought my palm would be a crutch, but you find yourself becoming much more familiar with the topics when you've looked them up several times (although I must admit that I carry my palm on me at all times and would be lost without it!).

 

[Sheon]

MEDPEDS:

My methods of study for the first two years has been similiar to what you have described, but distinctly more analoge (self-made flash cards). I have a palm (Sony Clie to be exact) and I find that I would like to use it more, but I can not find some of the software that I would like (Stedman's dictionary specifically) where can I go to find some of that software?

Thanks for the input.

 

[cmz]

I just took the medicine board last week and I used medicine blue prints and "The Internal Medicine Casebook" to study from. I used this in conjunction w/ pre-test's medicine book and I think I did fairly well (at least enough to pass, at least I hope so 🙂 ). I highly recommend this case book when you're on the wards.