Pediatrics Board Review

[BlahtoThis]

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I'm posting for a friend - she was wondering what the best prep is for the pediatrics boards at the end of residency. Money's no object. She has medstudy already but was wondering if there were good courses or other things that were better or offered for this. Any ideas??

 

[jerseygirl22]

UCLA Pediaitrics Review course or video set if she doesn't want to go to LA in April.


Rumor has it that this is the best review! 😳

 

[Bernardo_11]

I took the UCLA prep course as my 3rd year ed leave allowance. I found it to be pretty good but intense. Many of us are not used to that type of learning anymore with 6 straight lectures a day. I skipped a lot of them. What definitely helped was the materials. Lotta good notes. Although most of their publications have little or no photos, which is a big part of the exam.

I didn't take the boards right out of residency (couldn't afford it). So I took it in 2005. I think much of what you'll be doing is self study. I did a lot of studying from "Laughing Your way to passing the Pediatric boards." This book often gets mixed reviews, but I happened to love it. Lots and lots of high yield material. In addition I did tons of PREP questions. And I also did more practice questions published from the "Laughing" company. Oh, and I also flipped through Zitelli's a couple of times. I did pretty well when I got my scores back. And I never cracked open that old material I saved from the UCLA board review.

Honestly, it all depends on your style of learning. I'm not the best at memorizing tons of information. And I tend to retain more when I learn doing Q an A type stuff. The "Laughing" book helped me to focus my memorization on high yield material and so I felt that book was the most helpful for me.

Regards,
Nardo

 

[jackjinju]

Hey there, I liked your post. I'm a PL-3, and I'm doing quite a number of PREP questions, too. My plan is to do 5 years of 'em. How close are they to the boards, and how many do Qs did you do?

Thanks!

 

[Bernardo_11]

Hey there, I liked your post. I'm a PL-3, and I'm doing quite a number of PREP questions, too. My plan is to do 5 years of 'em. How close are they to the boards, and how many do Qs did you do?

Thanks!

Cool beans! Shoot for the 5 years. I only did 4 years worth (250 questions a year so thats 1,000). If you were to go through 5 years of PREP questions, and make sure you fully read the explanation for each answer, you will basically cover every "content specification" put out by the American Board of Pediatrics at least once over. One year of questions covers about 1/2 of the content specifications. So basically, do 5 years worth and you'll cover everything once, as well as get tons of repeated overlap.

As for the questions, they're actually a little easier that the actual boards, so I thought. But pretty close. A lot of the PREP questions are lacking in pictures, and since the picture book is basically 1/4 of the exam, you should make sure you look through an atlas a few times. Hope this helps.

Regards,
Nardo
DB Peds Fellow

 

[jackjinju]

Thanks a ton! Arrgh....the one other thing I wanted to ask u that I forgot to....do u feel that the "content specifications" are pretty much a complete version of what's on the exam? I would think it would be....just askin' someone who's been there.

Thanks again!

 

[Bernardo_11]

I'm not sure if I did go over "every" content specification per se, I actually didn't look at each once specifically. The only real useful part are the developmental milestones they say you need to know. After 4 years of prep, I'm sure there were some holes that I didn't go over. And on the actual board exam there were definitely some conditions that I did not go over, or the questions went into a depth that I did not study. I think it's going to happen to everyone, walking out of that test feeling like you failed, but there has to be a way to make a nice bell shaped curve. And putting in some horrendously hard questions is one of the ways.

Regards,
Nardo