Strategies for anesthesia boards/knowledge

[timtye78]

To all the successful residents online:

PLease share your best study strategies for performing well on the AKT and In Training Exams and, obviously the real written board exam.

My confusion is because some residents/attendings say to read from progressively comprehensive texts, while others swear they passed the boards using only baby Miller. Some swear by Jenson's review course, or doing practice questions. What say you?

I do not consider myself to be in the academic 'elite', so I do not have the photographic memory a lot of you guys/gals have, but I definitely do not want to get into any academic difficulties at this point.

I am looking for a methodical, systematic, high-yield, but a broad scoped anesthesia education approach. Any tips?

Thanks in advance.
T

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[UTSouthwestern]

Tim, you really just have to find a text that you are comfortable reading and can read over and over again to ingrain the important concepts you need to learn. I thought M&M and Faust were those texts for me. I read both cover to cover two or three times. They became my main reference texts.

I also supplemented with an old copy of Jensen's, Yao and Artusio, Board Stiff, and others. I have a hard time believing anyone passed the boards by studying only Baby Miller for three years. Using Baby Miller as your final review, after you have already read Jensen, Faust, Starr, etc., does not count as "passing the boards with only Baby Miller".

Questions are repeated in the boards and the retired tests released by the ABA are high yield.

My strategy was simple: Read one hour every day. Period. If you cannot pass the boards by reading for 365 hours in a year, you have serious issues.

Be organized and systematic with any book you choose and you should have no problems taking the tests.

 

[militarymd]

Hey, that's what I did....try to read 1 hour a day every day.

 

[Carm]

I remember Dr. Johnson had some research to back up a reading program at Southwestern. This may be at the tail end of your stay UT, but you are definitely in the know of things going on around there. I remember thinking that it sounded pretty cool. Some of it was obvious, but he had specific data showing how many hours a day his residents needed to read to increase their in service exams to passing and beyond. Pretty impressive stuff from a really impressive guy. Any of this familar UT?

 

[seattledoc]

I think that for your first year of anesthesia you can't go wrong with Morgan and Mikail (sp?). Read relevant topics, either to expand short topics covered by attendings or something pertaining to the days cases.
On top of that, Faust is great. Two page synopses of topics. Copy 5-10 topics and do 1-2 every day either in the OR (if the case and attd allow), or at some other time during the day. The nice thing about having the copies is that you can put them on the clipboard and be fairly discreet about reading in the OR.

 

[UTSouthwestern]

I remember Dr. Johnson had some research to back up a reading program at Southwestern. This may be at the tail end of your stay UT, but you are definitely in the know of things going on around there. I remember thinking that it sounded pretty cool. Some of it was obvious, but he had specific data showing how many hours a day his residents needed to read to increase their in service exams to passing and beyond. Pretty impressive stuff from a really impressive guy. Any of this familar UT?

Very familiar since I was there for the presentation at the Las Vegas ASA meeting last year. There was an almost linear correlation between average reading times and board scores, with only two outliers in 55 residents. The top two scorers that year read between 3-4 hours a day and scored 47 and 50 on the board exam. In the last 6 months before the real boards, I was reading 3-6 hours a day and my score was, let's just say, better than expected.

Of course Dr. J's study is underpowered, not controlled, blah, blah, blah, but the raw data was pretty impressive to see. A perfect line.

Questions, questions, questions. Going through test questions forces you to think in the terms of the test makers. I cannot overemphasize its importance. You can also use it as a great changeup to just reading books endlessly.

 

[Zeffer]

Don't worry Tim, I outright, down and dirty failed. We'll do better next year.