I went to the Ho 2-day weekend course and followed it with the Mon-Tue must-know cases course. Overall was kind of disappointed. Wasn't a total waste because - if nothing else - it was about 45 hours of focused study time.
The book is pretty good. Too big to be a "review" book but I like the question & spoken answer format. The public mock orals were not real helpful, except maybe as a confidence booster. I'm reluctant to cast stones at anyone who volunteered to get grilled by Ho in front of 50 people, but they were all pretty weak and many were just astonishingly bad. Some of the things they said and did were incredible. In that sense it was reassuring (I'd like to think they mostly filled the pool from which failures come). There are some shaky candidates out there. I don't know how Ho can keep the poker face and not cringe when they say dangerously bizarre, weird stuff.
The private exams I did were good. I thought the experience of walking into a hotel room with a stem to face a stranger was helpful, and by the end I was somewhat desensitized to the weirdness of it all.
The must-know cases were OK. Basically gave 8 or 9 exams and received 8 or 9 exams to/from other students. Then Ho gave his answers to the scripted questions, sometimes with a short review of a topic. Most of the topic reviews I thought were rather low yield ... I was much more interested in how he handled ambiguous questions and uncertainty, not 20 minutes on the anesthetic implications of myasthenia gravis. You can pick your partners and I managed to avoid the really weak public examinees from the previous two days.
Overall the course re-highlighted a couple of areas where I know I'm weak, and really proved to me the importance of talking. Just in those 4 days I got much better at articulating answers, so I guess it was worthwhile. Still kind of underwhelmed ... glad the cost was covered by my hospital CME fund.
At this point I think the remainder of my prep will be 4 or 5 practice exams each week (probably my wife reading the questions to me), with some reading on the side. I had consistently solid and good feedback from my private examiners, and feel reasonably confident now, a couple months early.
And yet I know some awfully smart, capable anesthesiologists who failed their first time up. I think there's room for ANYONE to fail. I'll be glad and relieved when this damn thing is behind me.
