Shelf exams

[vnacyd]

Hi, I was just wondering what shelf exams were? Thanks,

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[Pilot Doc]

The National Board of Medical Examiners writes subject specific standardized exams. At my school, they are used for some of the third year clerkships, but I think there are basic science shelf exams also. The tests are similar to the NBME licensing exams (e.g. Step 2), but shorter. The ones I've taken have 100 questions, allow two hours, and are rather challenging.

The tests don't count at all toward your official board scores.

 

[KU Brendan]

I am not a big fan of shelfs and have my OBGYN one this Friday. To expand on the previous post, they are usually part of the third year clerkships at most schools. They require you to have a basic knowledge about the subject which may or may not be what you learn during the clerkship. Thus, it's one of those things where you just have to get review books and study out of books instead of relying on the knowledge you acquire actually doing things. Most people at my school use either the NMS series, "Secrets" series, Blueprints, and/or Appleton and Lange questions (although beware: the questions in these books are the old "fact" type, and shelf questions have all shifted to the stupid vignette type...sorry about the editorial comment there).

As I mentioned, the questions tend to all have a paragraph vignette to them and may or may not even make the questions they are asking obvious.

At least at my school, the shelf counts for anywhere from 25-50% of the overall grade in the clerkship, meaning that even if you are a great student and get wonderful evaluations, you may not get an A in the clerkship if you don't do well on the shelf. Each clerkship also has a minimal passing score (or else they make you retake the shelf or even the rotation). Check with your school to see what they do.

Yes, there are shelfs for basic science classes, but most schools don't use them since they cost the school so much. We had to take one in Micro and Path during second year. I am just looking forward to next year and being done with the things!

I hope this helped (and didn't insult your intelligence if you already knew all of that).

--Brendan--
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[vnacyd]

Thanks for the help. I will be starting my clerkships in a couple of weeks, so all of your info was great.

 

[Dr Sardonicus]

Are your scores on the shelf exams reported to the residency programs you apply to, or just the overall grade in the clerkship?

 

[jackjinju]

Well, at my school our transcript just shows our final grade, but I have heard that on our Deans Letter, next to the comments made on our clerkship evaluations it could say "Clinical Honors, Overall Grade Highly Satisfactory", which implies that the reason one "only" got HS was because of a not-high-enough shelf exam score. This is good because several of my grades fall into such a category, where I got clinical honors, but that wouldn't otherwise show up on my transcript, so 6 weeks of hard work on the floor would be shot to hell otherwise.

 

[KU Brendan]

We were told that NRMS is switching to having some kind of standard form that med schools will start using, and on it, the school is supposed to provide some kind of info about all of our shelf grades. At my school, we aren't able to get honors (an A) in a course without doing well on the shelf since each clerkship makes the shelf count for a certain (25-50%) amount of our grade.

--Brendan--
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