Shelf vs. in-house exam

[UCLAstudent]

Perhaps a dumb question, but ... is the preparation for these the same? I just found out that my surgery exam will be an in-house exam. Is it still worthwhile to do questions from sources geared more toward shelf exams, such as Pre-Test?

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[Medstudentquest]

Perhaps a dumb question, but ... is the preparation for these the same? I just found out that my surgery exam will be an in-house exam. Is it still worthwhile to do questions from sources geared more toward shelf exams, such as Pre-Test?

Are you sure it's not a house exam in addition to a shelf exam? I think that's pretty standard. I would make sure if I were you, because you don't want to findout you do have a shelf and not study for it.

 

[UCLAstudent]

Are you sure it's not a house exam in addition to a shelf exam? I think that's pretty standard. I would make sure if I were you, because you don't want to findout you do have a shelf and not study for it.

99% sure --- I just looked at the syllabus and there's one written exam, and it's in-house.

 

[Medstudentquest]

99% sure --- I just looked at the syllabus and there's one written exam, and it's in-house.

Wow you are so lucky! I thought all schools took shelf exams for core rotations. I can't offer any advice then, since I havent taken in house exams. Sorry!

 

[MonkeyRalph]

I think the best way to gauge how to prepare would be for you to ask someone, probably an MS IV at your school who has already taken that exam. At our school, most of our clerkships had shelf exams, except for Family and Neuro. For those exams, it would not have helped us to study for a shelf, because they were way easier than shelf exams. But things may be different at your institution. I don't think you'll get much help from this forum unless someone here has already taken that exam and knows how shelf-esque it is.

 

[UCLAstudent]

Thanks, dwerho. I'll ask around. We have shelf exams for most rotations, but I guess surgery's an exception.

 

[mdphd2b]

Wow you are so lucky! I thought all schools took shelf exams for core rotations. I can't offer any advice then, since I havent taken in house exams. Sorry!

It varies by school...At Pitt, our only shelf exams are Surgery, IM, Psych, and Neuro.
We have in-house exams for Peds, OB/GYN, Family Med, Anesthesia, Outpt med/peds (CAMPC), and Surg Subsp. Personally I would prefer all shelf exams, since those are more standardized and written by professional test-writers. I find our in-house exams to be very subjective. Plus the multiple choice questions (submitted by various faculty) often have typos (ie, a vignette missing a question stem but listing answer choices comes to mind!) and are either too general or too specific. Our OB/GYN exam was a JOKE--it was mostly essay, and the questions were way too open-ended. Anyway, just my 2pennies.

 

[Medstudentquest]

It varies by school...At Pitt, our only shelf exams are Surgery, IM, Psych, and Neuro.
We have in-house exams for Peds, OB/GYN, Family Med, Anesthesia, Outpt med/peds (CAMPC), and Surg Subsp. Personally I would prefer all shelf exams, since those are more standardized and written by professional test-writers. I find our in-house exams to be very subjective. Plus the multiple choice questions (submitted by various faculty) often have typos (ie, a vignette missing a question stem but listing answer choices comes to mind!) and are either too general or too specific. Our OB/GYN exam was a JOKE--it was mostly essay, and the questions were way too open-ended. Anyway, just my 2pennies.

Wow really? So i assume that it must be pretty easy then to get Honors in all these rotations?

 

[mdphd2b]

Wow really? So i assume that it must be pretty easy then to get Honors in all these rotations?

Clinical evals, which are of course even more subjective, carry the most percentage points here (at least that's what they tell us). But to get Honors vs. High Pass you need to make minimum score cut-offs on the exam.

Here's my 3rd year strategy: I basically studied for each exam as if to Honor it (and I did, except Surgery I don't know b/c I just took it end of June). Then my clinical evals determined if I got Honors vs HP.

And yes, honoring OB/GYN was a cinch. Like I said the essay exam=joke. We were told only to give our clinical eval cards to the faculty/residents of our choosing, so I would plan ahead who to impress the most on each service. I hated that rotation, avoided doing real work (and most residents), yet somehow I got Honors

To the OP: What I learned about in-house exams is they don't always cover what's in the shelf-exam-type review books. It's more based on faculty's preferred learning objectives, so if they give you a syllabus or specific topics, then focus mainly on those. I remember our Family Med in-house exam came DIRECTLY from a stack of articles we had to read and memorize factoids from. No outside reading was required. Talk to senior students in your class about the in-house exams.

 

[Medstudentquest]

Clinical evals, which are of course even more subjective, carry the most percentage points here (at least that's what they tell us). But to get Honors vs. High Pass you need to make minimum score cut-offs on the exam.

Here's my 3rd year strategy: I basically studied for each exam as if to Honor it (and I did, except Surgery I don't know b/c I just took it end of June). Then my clinical evals determined if I got Honors vs HP.

And yes, honoring OB/GYN was a cinch. Like I said the essay exam=joke. We were told only to give our clinical eval cards to the faculty/residents of our choosing, so I would plan ahead who to impress the most on each service. I hated that rotation, avoided doing real work (and most residents), yet somehow I got Honors

What I learned about in-house exams is they don't always cover what's in the shelf-exam-type review books. It's more based on faculty's preferred learning objectives, so if they give you a syllabus or specific topics, then focus mainly on those. I remember our Family Med in-house exam came DIRECTLY from a stack of articles we had to read and memorize factoids from. No outside reading was required. Talk to senior students in your class about the in-house exams.

That makes me want to cry. I had a horrific OB rotation and no I certainly did not honor it. I actually have not heard of a single person who has honored it. That totally sucks that we don't get in house exams. Shelf exams are tough. They are making my life a nightmare actually and destroying my clinical grades. I wish I had in house exams! Did you get honors in all your rotations? Any proficients at all?

 

[mdphd2b]

That makes me want to cry. I had a horrific OB rotation and no I certainly did not honor it. I actually have not heard of a single person who has honored it. That totally sucks that we don't get in house exams. Shelf exams are tough. They are making my life a nightmare actually and destroying my clinical grades. I wish I had in house exams! Did you get honors in all your rotations? Any proficients at all?

Hey Medstudentquest,

I'm sorry about your OB/GYN experience🙁 I know it's painful for a LOT of students here too. I didn't mean to sound snotty or anything. Basically I talked to a bunch of senior students/residents (my former '04 classmates) to get an idea of how to survive OB/Gyn and preserve my sanity. Regarding grades, I only Honored 2 MS3 clerkships (psych/Neuro and OB/GYN), the rest were HP, plus Surgery/Anesthesia's still TBA. The main reason I liked the shelf ones was that I felt they would help prep me better for Step2. One shelf strategy I used was doing as many MCQ's as I could--there comes a point when studying pages of review texts must come to an end. Don't know how many shelves you have left, but stick to doing tons of MCQ's the last 2wk, and read all the answers. Also try Kaplan's Qbook. Hope things work out better

 

[Medstudentquest]

Hey Medstudentquest,

I'm sorry about your OB/GYN experience🙁 I know it's painful for a LOT of students here too. I didn't mean to sound snotty or anything. Basically I talked to a bunch of senior students/residents (my former '04 classmates) to get an idea of how to survive OB/Gyn and preserve my sanity. Regarding grades, I only Honored 2 MS3 clerkships (psych/Neuro and OB/GYN), the rest were HP, plus Surgery/Anesthesia's still TBA. The main reason I liked the shelf ones was that I felt they would help prep me better for Step2. One shelf strategy I used was doing as many MCQ's as I could--there comes a point when studying pages of review texts must come to an end. Don't know how many shelves you have left, but stick to doing tons of MCQ's the last 2wk, and read all the answers. Also try Kaplan's Qbook. Hope things work out better

Oh I didn't think you were being snotty! I just think that it's sad sometimes how different experiences are at different schools. I mean my OB rotation was one just like Childneuro said of both mental and physical abuse. I was not even allowed to give out evals to those whom I worked with! I worked with the interns for like 5 weeks and they were not allowed to evaluate I guess. My evals were given to those who had totally abused me throughout the rotation. Because I reported a needle stick incident and asked the patient to be tested (they refused!), all these people who I had never worked with "evaluated me." In other words, they just tried saying negative things about me and stuff. What I found really cowardly was that most of them did not even sign the evaluations, and some even put negative comments, untrue, in the "deans letter" area in order to try to knock me down. I worked super hard too, I might as well just shown up on the last day and would have probably gotten the same grade. Just terrible! But my point is that unfortunately, the system is unfair and residency committees unforunately don't see that people's grades are not necessarily because one student is superior to another, but sometimes the system is different. I personally have gotten clinical outstandings but because I have a LD, shelf exams are tough on me, so they kill my grades for example. It's just part of what we all gotta deal with though! 🙂

 

[mdphd2b]

My evals were given to those who had totally abused me throughout the rotation. Because I reported a needle stick incident and asked the patient to be tested (they refused!), all these people who I had never worked with "evaluated me." In other words, they just tried saying negative things about me and stuff.

Hey Medstudentquest,

That sucks about the needlestick issue. That happens so often on the floor, esp when we're on anesthesia and we learn how to start IV's. If it's any consolation, I have a story for you...I was scrubbed in on a long Gyn-Onc surgery (TAH-BSO), and while closing the fascia, my SENIOR OB/Gyn resident (soon to be a fellow), stuck the attending's hand not once, but TWICE in about 10 min! She was using the big-ass sutures too! The resident had to consent the pt for testing--she never said WHO stuck WHOM, just "a member of the surgical team", but luckily the pt was a nurse who understood. I feel bad that you were treated so poorly b/c of trying to practice standard precautions. That's just bad form of your seniors 😡

Regarding the Dean's Letter, do you get a chance to pre-view the dictated version befoe it goes out? At our school, we have one chance to check for typos, make corrections, or request to re-phrase certain parts. Perhaps that will help with the overall picture. Also, on the plus side your great clinical evals are proof that you can handle floor work despite the LD, so residencies will like to see those. Hopefully, you can take a 1-2 electives (before your AI) in your chosen specialty so you can fine-tune your skills, then on your AI you can shine 🙂

 

[Medstudentquest]

Hey Medstudentquest,

That sucks about the needlestick issue. That happens so often on the floor, esp when we're on anesthesia and we learn how to start IV's. If it's any consolation, I have a story for you...I was scrubbed in on a long Gyn-Onc surgery (TAH-BSO), and while closing the fascia, my SENIOR OB/Gyn resident (soon to be a fellow), stuck the attending's hand not once, but TWICE in about 10 min! She was using the big-ass sutures too! The resident had to consent the pt for testing--she never said WHO stuck WHOM, just "a member of the surgical team", but luckily the pt was a nurse who understood. I feel bad that you were treated so poorly b/c of trying to practice standard precautions. That's just bad form of your seniors 😡

Regarding the Dean's Letter, do you get a chance to pre-view the dictated version befoe it goes out? At our school, we have one chance to check for typos, make corrections, or request to re-phrase certain parts. Perhaps that will help with the overall picture. Also, on the plus side your great clinical evals are proof that you can handle floor work despite the LD, so residencies will like to see those. Hopefully, you can take a 1-2 electives (before your AI) in your chosen specialty so you can fine-tune your skills, then on your AI you can shine 🙂

Ya I know, the OB abuse was horrific. I am thinking of filing a lawsuit or filing a complaint or something, but I'll be doing that probably as an M4 or an intern. I feel that it was bad that they tried to cover things up like they did, it was worse that they tried to screw me over in the evaluations like they did as well. How I was pimped and abused by the attending who was present during the procedure afterwards was just insane as well. Just plain horrible. The emotional abuse was terrible and my health was at risk. I don't know how they can even legally deny me the chance to test the patient, especially when I asked them to do so. I think that it's important to put a stop to the abuse that goes on in OB gyne. It's ridiculous and pointless. I would love to get that site off of the listings for my school.

We do get to see our Dean's letter before it goes out so I think overall things will be ok. I also got a clinical outstanding on my chosen specialty and the site director told me to contact him if I ever wanted to do research or an elective in the future, which I'll be doing in a while. So not all rotations have been horrible at least! 🙂