I think most residents over-worry about the PRITE because it's a new thing to them, and prior experiences with big standardized exams such as the USMLE can provoke PTSD-like anxiety.
If one is doing very poor on the PRITE by 3rd and 4th year, now that is something to consider because it does have a correlation with the written board exam, but that's as far as I'd take my worries with it. The board exam is the actual thing to worry about.
One might think why care about the difference between the board exam and the PRITE? Just like there's several USMLE books out there with sample questions that do not "feel" like you're taking the actual USMLE, the same thing applies to the PRITE and the written board exam. At least for me, I didn't feel the PRITE was a good study tool because several of the questions I felt weren't explained well. There were some questions, for example, where 5 colleagues tried to find an explanation for the answer and after a google search and several textbooks later, we still could not find it, or found some data to support the answer that we didn't feel was enough to put it on an exam.
The actual board exam I thought was fair, where I thought several questions on the PRITE needed more work, and may have been experimental questions. If I didn't know an answer on the board exam, I at least remembered where the information was in the textbooks or my notes.
If you're in your PGY-1 or 2 year, you might not be at a point where you care about the difference between the PRITE and the written board. That's understandable. My post is more for those in the PGY III and IV years.
