AMG - passed with nothing too close to borderline, ICE was a lot higher than CIS. I spent 2 months freaking out and losing years of my life over this stupid test so hopefully this post can help others who are anxious before/after this thing
My experience:
Took it in LA. Studied half-heartedly for maybe a week or two for a couple hours in the evening and more on the weekend.
I felt that First Aid did not prepare me well yet there is no better resource so kind of a catch-22. The # of questions they ask is so unrealistic. Also the way they want you to CAGE/counsel etc I think is artificial and actually detracted from my CIS score.
My main tips would be:
1) Make you sure you do a thorough ROS! You should have a standard ROS you ask everyone and then do system specific as it pertains to the case. I did not do this and feel like I missed 2/12 diagnoses because of this
2) A lot of people on these threads say the diagnoses are super obvious. I do not agree. I would say 40% were obvious, 40% you could get if you asked the right questions and 20% I'm still not sure what they were going for. They can be easy to miss if you don't ask ROS and SPECIFIC qs because SPs are trained to only respond to specific questions
3) Similar to 2. This isn't like your school's OSCE where the SPs volunteer most of the important info if you ask enough open ended questions. I felt like I needed to know what my main diagnoses were so I could know what to ask
4) Ask EVERY female pt about LMP, ask everyone about diet/exercise etc.
5) You don't have to get all the diagnoses right. I feel like I missed the top diagnosis in 3/12 and in 1 other still don't really know what they were going for. In a couple of others my diagnoses were misordered. Still got high performance on ICE
6) For CIS watch the videos online of performance on the official website, I did this AFTER my test and wish I had done it before. I think I got too caught up in CAGEing, counseling etc and forgot to just do the basic empathy stuff. Don't CAGE people who drink 1 drink per week, etc. First aid goes a little overboard imo with the idea that there is a CIS checklist and you have to do all this stuff. I ended up spending so much time doing that stuff during my first encounter I didn't even have time for closure
7) Closure carries a lot of points for CIS make sure you leave enough time for it. If I had to redo it I would save all the counseling for the end. I think trying to counsel during the data gathering part really messed up my flow and cost me time I could have used to take a better history.
8) A word about pertinent negatives. I think one thing that helped me a lot is I had a lot of evidence for each diagnosis. The way I did this was by maximizing the use of pertinent negatives. These can be things like "vitals WNL." This is not super intuitive so look at how First Aid does it and practice doing it, they actually do a nice job.
9) When you go through First Aid role play the scenarios and practice the note on the real software. 10 minutes seems like enough, but it is actually not much time for the note, I almost ran out of time in every one, probably because I spent the full 15 mins in the room for almost every patient.
Overall: I made A LOT of mistakes and still got high performance for ICE, so despite the posts on here where people seemingly did everything right and failed I think there is a lot of leeway. I think it is more important to have reasonable, well, supported diagnoses than it is to "get the answer." For many of my cases there were many reasonable diagnostic possibilities suggested by the history and only after leaving the exam did I miss what they were probably going for but it didn't seem to hurt me.
