Here's one feedback from one of our graduates....for July 2011
Here's a review of all the stuff I used or at least looked through:
1. Brattons Board Review Book, over 1000 questions
- LOVED IT. Haha, even though I had the 2007 version, I still learned a lot from it. The 2010 version is the newest. It's organized by organ system and the answers were concise. Easy to get through - I finished the book in a week - but that's without doing anything else.
2. AAFP: should get your login and password now - we all have one
- Link directly to board review question bank -
http://www.aafp.org/online/en/home/cme/boardrev/questions.html - I would do all of these... even though lot of them overlap with the ITE exams
- There were probably 10 questions on the real exam that were EXACTLY the same as ones from this question bank and the format is really similar to the real test
3. First Aid for Family Medicine:
- Long - its like 700 pages - but I liked it because I had somewhere to organize all of my information and a place to take notes since my studying was so sporadic during residency
- Good to use to review the charts and tables in the last few days when I was tired of doing questions
4. Swanson's
- Too easy, I didnt do many of the questions. Brattons is better
5. AAFP board review audio CDs or DVDs of lectures
- I listened to most of the lectures and took notes in my first aid book
- Workshops - WAY too long, low yield, didnt do them
6. ABFM - again, get your login and password, you all have one
- They make the test so you can read about the it, the 5 sections, the breakdown of topics, and the 2 specialty topics you need to choose (everyone chooses ambulatory care and then something else - I think most of us did women's health or hospitalist)
- Can downlad old ITE exams - I would do all of them
- They have an iphone app that you can get for free and do "mini exams" - that was really helpful when you have a short break at the hospital
- These questions overlap with the AAFP ones
7. Core Content: The department purchased this program for us - 900 questions, computer based
- The question format is not similar to the ones on the real test, but the answers were pretty informative - i learned a lot from just reading the explanations
- Many questions are not relevant - like "which isotope is used in bone scans' - so you should do Brattons and AAFP first to know what questions are high yield to do and which ones to just skip
- Computer program takes a long time to load and erased my answers and statistics after I did half of them... so I wouldnt use this unless you're out of the other questions
