Specialty boards studying

[futuredvm297]

Hey all,

For those in residency, how do you study for specialty exams? What strategies do you all use?

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[JaynaAli]

Read, read, read, read some more. Then read it again. Then again. I summarized articles from our main publication onto notecards and word documents for quick review. I used quizlet’s image occlusion feature to quiz myself on images for the general section of boards. My program participated in an annual mock board exam so I did that all three years plus took previous year’s mock exams and other practice tests we had in our info bank. But the vast majority of boards prep is self directed reading of articles and books.

 

[futuredvm297]

@JaynaAli Is it usually journal articles from the past 4 years? Are you told which ones are "sentinel" AKA you have to KNOW that paper like the back of your hand? Are reading abstracts/discussion usually enough?

 

[JaynaAli]

@JaynaAli Is it usually journal articles from the past 4 years? Are you told which ones are "sentinel" AKA you have to KNOW that paper like the back of your hand? Are reading abstracts/discussion usually enough?

Your specialty should have a reading list that explicitly states what expectations are/which publications and how long back is testable. For clinical pathology, we have four journals and are told a nicely vague “focus on articles from the last five years” but really that’s just vague enough that older material is also still somewhat fair game. There are some listed as primary “principal sources” and others as secondary “supplemental sources”. But, for example, the ACZM exotics reading list is much much more extensive with way more articles and books.

For path, there were definitely some questions that could be answered from the title and abstract, but in general I read the entire thing to pick out things that seemed like testable facts. I’d skim the more anatomic-based articles in Vet Pathology or some of the randos in JVIM but like our main Vet Clinical Pathology journal I’d highly recommend everyone read everything.

 

[allygator13]

This will vary vastly between specialty and specific program within that specialty. In my program, we had weekly Journal Club and Board Prep sessions, so that by the time we were off to truly study for the preliminary exam at the beginning of 3rd year (multiple choice that covers physics, anatomy, physiology/pathophys, radiation biology, journal articles), we'd seen all the information at least twice beforehand and were familiar. This is not so in other programs, where they will literally hand you textbooks or stacks of notes and just expect you to learn it all on your own, often only in the few weeks leading up to the exam. Also for ACVR, they have a very vague directive of knowing our journal's papers over the past 10 years, but questions that do not fit that description still show up. So yes, definitely reading a lot, making notes on papers that you can easily and quickly reference in the future for reviewing, and going through any pre-made mock exams or quizzes that other residents or faculty have made. ACVR also now has a committee that has created mock exams for residents in anatomy, physics, and a literature-based one which were helpful too. For the certifying exam, which is all image interpretation, you have basically prepared for that test your whole residency, so studying for it is very different, and it's all about seeing more and more cases and being prepared to work through anything they give you under a time crunch.

 

[SocialStigma]

I made a study schedule and divided each day into 3 blocks (9am-12pm, 1-5pm, 6-9pm). I studied a different area for each block to make it less boring. ACVS publishes how much topic is weighted (eg. 35% MSK, 20% soft tissue, etc) and I allocated more blocks to the bigger, more heavily weighted topics, as well as topics I didn't know as well. I would read journal articles related to each chapter once I finished that chapter, but my focus was on the material and not journal articles. It's impossible to know every single journal article from the past 5 years anyway. ACVS does not tell us which papers are sentinel ones. I had read a lot of the articles already through weekly journal club during my residency, and those I had notes on. For any new articles, I would read the abstract and then skim the paper if it seemed important. I found doing mock exams more stressful when I was actually studying for boards because it would scare me when I didn't know the answer, so I stopped doing them.