Ok, so I have been lurking on here since I started med school in 2009. I am finally posting for the first time ever because while there is some awesome info on here about the oral board experience, I had a terrible last 3 weeks waiting for my SOE/OSCE results. Fortunately, I found out yesterday that I passed. It was, hands down, the most elated I have ever felt regarding a test result. Since the 2018 exam dates are complete, I hope the following can help someone during the next round of board exams.
I started reading Yao about 6 months before I took the exam. It was a poor choice. 6 months will burn you out, and you're unlikely to remember much detail from that far out. I started really studying with another person about 4 months prior to my test. He and I would get together 1-2 times a week and go over UBP stems. We ramped up to 2-3 sessions a week in the month before the test. At that point I was reading about 5 nights a week for 1-2 hrs. I took 5 "formal" board style exams from past/present examiners in my city I had gotten to know along the way.
I'll pause here to say that as much as I found these "formal" practice exams to be helpful, the actual exam was much more disorienting and difficult. This is because in my actual exam all 4 examiners cut me off much sooner and more abruptly/aggressively than any of the examiners I had practiced with. I dont know if this was due to bias of having a prior relationship with those that I took practice exam from, but I suspect that was the case.
I slowed down practice the week before the test. This was also a mistake. A few people on this forum have talked about how "of course it's a knowledge test". Yes that's true, but you wont fail for saying "I don't know" about the mechanism for a particular drug. You can, however, easily fail for not answering your questions efficiently or prioritizing what you would do in a given situation. A VERY COMMON situation I did not expect to encounter was that I would have a really well-formulated answer for a question but wouldn't get to the key aspect of my answer before getting cut off by the examiner with another question. This led to many questions that I felt I answered somewhat poorly- not because of inadequate preparation, but because I expected to have more that 1.5 sentences to explain myself. This is huge, and I didn't incorporate this into my studying very well at all.
I felt very prepared for the test prior to exam day. I honestly thought I would walk out knowing I had passed. That's not at all what happened. Walking into the first room all my calm, collected thoughts were suddenly gone. Several of the questions the examiner asked I knew the answer to but couldn't come up with in time. Overall, though, I felt ok after finishing the first stem. Second stem I had decent notes on, but the examiner quickly saw through the patient problems I had "prepared for" during the 10 min. allowed, and steered me completely away from them. I got rattled and threw out some dumb answers. By the time I hit the extra topics I was a mess. And I didn't make it through my last extra topic.
I then went to the OSCE which went fairly well. If you study the outline and resources presented on the ABA website, I can't see why it would present too much difficulty. Perhaps that's oversimplifying it, but by the time I took it I was really just focused on NOT thinking about my SOE.
The three weeks that followed were hell. There were only 2-3 things I had to look up because I genuinely did not know the answer. For everything else, I just mentally rehashed my answers and beat myself up for not answering them better. There were some days I felt that it was more likely than not that I passed. More often, however, I mentally prepared to see "failed" on score day and prayed that somehow I was just imagining the worst. I tried to imagine how I would explain to people that I couldn't pass the final test of my training. Explain how the first test I ever failed was perhaps the most important one. Told myself that "life would go on", and tried to estimate how much prep I would have to do before the next attempt. But honestly, if I had to take it again tomorrow, I know I would do markedly better with no additional studying. I am certain of it. And finally, I promised myself that if I did pass I would write this so that next time someone is searching the forums for a similar experience they would stumble onto this post and find some hope.
Finally, this past Monday came- the ABA should have released the scores that day. I started checked at 9:30. I checked about twice an hour. Finally gave up at about 3pm. I guess they observed Veteran's day. Regardless, I finally got my "pass" on Tuesday. I'm still partially shocked and completely elated. Everyone I have talked to always says "if you feel like you failed, but didn't do anything really dumb, you passed". As it turns out, I guess that's probably true. But if you're reading this, feeling like I did for the majority of the last 3 weeks, just know there is hope.
I started reading Yao about 6 months before I took the exam. It was a poor choice. 6 months will burn you out, and you're unlikely to remember much detail from that far out. I started really studying with another person about 4 months prior to my test. He and I would get together 1-2 times a week and go over UBP stems. We ramped up to 2-3 sessions a week in the month before the test. At that point I was reading about 5 nights a week for 1-2 hrs. I took 5 "formal" board style exams from past/present examiners in my city I had gotten to know along the way.
I'll pause here to say that as much as I found these "formal" practice exams to be helpful, the actual exam was much more disorienting and difficult. This is because in my actual exam all 4 examiners cut me off much sooner and more abruptly/aggressively than any of the examiners I had practiced with. I dont know if this was due to bias of having a prior relationship with those that I took practice exam from, but I suspect that was the case.
I slowed down practice the week before the test. This was also a mistake. A few people on this forum have talked about how "of course it's a knowledge test". Yes that's true, but you wont fail for saying "I don't know" about the mechanism for a particular drug. You can, however, easily fail for not answering your questions efficiently or prioritizing what you would do in a given situation. A VERY COMMON situation I did not expect to encounter was that I would have a really well-formulated answer for a question but wouldn't get to the key aspect of my answer before getting cut off by the examiner with another question. This led to many questions that I felt I answered somewhat poorly- not because of inadequate preparation, but because I expected to have more that 1.5 sentences to explain myself. This is huge, and I didn't incorporate this into my studying very well at all.
I felt very prepared for the test prior to exam day. I honestly thought I would walk out knowing I had passed. That's not at all what happened. Walking into the first room all my calm, collected thoughts were suddenly gone. Several of the questions the examiner asked I knew the answer to but couldn't come up with in time. Overall, though, I felt ok after finishing the first stem. Second stem I had decent notes on, but the examiner quickly saw through the patient problems I had "prepared for" during the 10 min. allowed, and steered me completely away from them. I got rattled and threw out some dumb answers. By the time I hit the extra topics I was a mess. And I didn't make it through my last extra topic.
I then went to the OSCE which went fairly well. If you study the outline and resources presented on the ABA website, I can't see why it would present too much difficulty. Perhaps that's oversimplifying it, but by the time I took it I was really just focused on NOT thinking about my SOE.
The three weeks that followed were hell. There were only 2-3 things I had to look up because I genuinely did not know the answer. For everything else, I just mentally rehashed my answers and beat myself up for not answering them better. There were some days I felt that it was more likely than not that I passed. More often, however, I mentally prepared to see "failed" on score day and prayed that somehow I was just imagining the worst. I tried to imagine how I would explain to people that I couldn't pass the final test of my training. Explain how the first test I ever failed was perhaps the most important one. Told myself that "life would go on", and tried to estimate how much prep I would have to do before the next attempt. But honestly, if I had to take it again tomorrow, I know I would do markedly better with no additional studying. I am certain of it. And finally, I promised myself that if I did pass I would write this so that next time someone is searching the forums for a similar experience they would stumble onto this post and find some hope.
Finally, this past Monday came- the ABA should have released the scores that day. I started checked at 9:30. I checked about twice an hour. Finally gave up at about 3pm. I guess they observed Veteran's day. Regardless, I finally got my "pass" on Tuesday. I'm still partially shocked and completely elated. Everyone I have talked to always says "if you feel like you failed, but didn't do anything really dumb, you passed". As it turns out, I guess that's probably true. But if you're reading this, feeling like I did for the majority of the last 3 weeks, just know there is hope.
