What is the point of the WQE?

[ophtholife12345]

If the point is to collect money, why have an exam?

If the point is patient safety, why don’t practicing doctors take the exam as a part of recertification?

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[ophtholife12345]

I understand the same logic could be applied to the oral boards but the mechanics of having several hundred doctors go through oral boards would not be feasible. However, a multiple choice test could easily be scaled for every practicing physician every 10 years.

In my opinion, the point should be patient safety but the format of the WQE is not conducive to making safe ophthalmologists. Instead of asking about the inheritance patterns of rare disease, how about asking about basic safety issues that are not complex but important?

 

[airplanes]

What is the point of any written exam? You've probably taken hundreds by now. You may want to start here:

Written Qualifying Exam | American Board of Ophthalmology

The written qualifying examination (WQE) is a 250 multiple-choice question examination designed to evaluate the breadth and depth of the basic science and...

abop.org

 

[EyeGuy15]

I think the main point of esoteric WQE questions is that if you're willing to take the time to learn the minutiae, you have taken the field of ophthalmology seriously enough and properly learned the fundamentals to be a competent ophthalmologist.

I would compare it to the rider (demands) that bands make for concerts. They really don't care if "all the m & m's in the dressing room are blue." They put that in the rider to make sure the venue/promoter is on top of the important stuff like proper/safe stage construction etc. If the venue/promoter is willing to spend the time and energy to pick out blue m & m's and ensure not a single different colored m & m is in the bowl, then they can be reasonably confident that the important stuff wasn't neglected.

 

[Dusn]

I don't mind the exams, aside from the fee we have to pay to take them.

But what is the point of the "Improvement in Medical Practice" activities that we have to do? We have to type in data from a bunch of cataract surgery charts and then report follow up after several months? This is a tedious waste of time. What did you all do to get through that activity?