Jack Krasuski MD

How to Study for Your ABPN Board Exam: Prioritize “the Big and the Bad” for Smarter Board Prep

May 15, 2025 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts, Board Certification, How to Prepare For Your Board Exam Tags: ABPN board exam, board exam prep, board exam prep tips, board exam questions

No matter how much time you have remaining to prepare for your ABPN board exam, you must still prioritize certain exam topics over others. This is true because even if you go through ALL the material once or even twice during your board exam prep, there will always remain topics that you’ll perform worse on during your practice tests. How do you know which topics you’re weaker on as you’re progressing through your studies? If you took the exam previously… Click to Read More

Two Pathways to Addiction Medicine Board Certification

May 7, 2025 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts, Board Certification Tags: addiction medicine, addiction medicine certification

Register for the 2025 Addiction Medicine Exam from May 21-June 30, 2025 & get your practice pathway application approved by June 30, 2025 From now until the end of 2025, the American Board of Preventive Medicine (ABPM) offers two ways for physicians to become board-certified Addiction Medicine specialists – the “traditional certification pathway” and the “clinical practice pathway.” The ABPM recognizes that physicians working in addictions have diverse medical specialty training, and therefore, the medical specialty board offers these two… Click to Read More

EXACT Board Exam Prep Accelerator Delivers Custom Board Success — Here’s How

March 28, 2025 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts, How to Prepare For Your Board Exam Tags: board exam prep, board exam prep tips, board prep, psychiatry board prep

EXACT is a proprietary algorithm that customizes a study program for each learner. The learner completes a board-reflective practice test and EXACT converts the results into a personalized board prep review schedule and study plan so learners pass on their first try At American Physician Institute (API), a leading medical education and certification solutions provider, we offer EXACT — a FREE game-changing board prep program for medical professionals. API’s proprietary EXACT algorithm powers the program, which provides individuals with personalized… Click to Read More

Why the Oasis Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Conference Is Great for Pediatricians, Neurologists, and Primary Care Providers

January 20, 2025 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts Tags: Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Conference, psychiatry conference

I regularly hear from non-psychiatrists, especially from pediatricians and primary care providers, how unaligned their training was to the types of problems their patients present with. A major mismatch is in mental health. A large percentage of youth presenting for general medical treatment or preventive care have mental health issues. These emotional or behavioral disorders may be brought in as presenting complaints, volunteered as additional problems, or kept private until explicitly assessed. But in all cases, they are likely to… Click to Read More

ABPN® Exam: What’s in Scope and Out of Scope on the Psychiatry Board Exams?

August 30, 2024 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts Tags: ABPN board exam, ABPN exam, abpn exam guidelines, board exam prep, Dr Jack Krasuski, psychiatry board exam, psychiatry board exam prep, psychiatry board tips, Psychiatry boards

As part of our ongoing quality assurance, I’ve been reviewing and addressing comments left by learners regarding specific multiple-choice questions that make up our ABPN® exam psychiatry 2300+ question QBank. (Our QBank allows each learner to comment on any and all QBank questions.) One of the most common comments I’m encountering is one that questions whether the topic of the QBank question is in the scope of the exam, meaning whether it is a learning point that is tested on… Click to Read More

Neurology Topics on the ABPN Psychiatry Board Exam

August 6, 2024 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts, How to Prepare For Your Board Exam Tags: ABPN board exam, abpn psychiatry certification exam, psychiatry board exam, psychiatry board exam prep

Prepping for an ABPN Psychiatry Board Exam? Get a comprehensive Psychiatry Board Review Course from Beat the Boards! to get your board prep on track. There are two questions I get asked related to neurology disorders on the ABPN psychiatry board exam: Are the neurocognitive disorders included in the neurological disorders category? What should I study when studying the neurological disorders on my psychiatry exam? Neurocognitive Vs. Neurological Disorders On ABPN Psychiatry Exam First clarification: the neurocognitive disorders topic on… Click to Read More

What Are Dimension 1 and Dimension 2 on the ABPN Exam, and How Do They Affect Exam Preparation?

August 5, 2024 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts

Here’s a representative question I received from a colleague preparing for the ABPN exam. “What exactly do we study for Dimension 2? Is it just interwoven into all the other topics? There are a bunch of extra topics that don’t seem to be assigned to any specific topic tested on. Would some of it be those?” Let me briefly present Dimension 1 to set the context. For example, Dimension 1 on the ABPN exam fo Psychiatry Certification lists 24 topics.… Click to Read More

Benefits of In-Person Attendance at the Beat The Boards! Psychiatry Certification Courses

June 25, 2024 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts

Our annual live Beat The Boards! In-Person Psychiatry Review Course is coming up July 16-20, 2025. And this year we are including an in-person review course for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry as well from July 9-13, 2025. Let me share the benefits – as I see them – of attending the course in-person. Pros of In-Person Psychiatry Course Attendance CRAMMING Cramming for an exam, if that’s all you do, is not a great strategy, but it can be a… Click to Read More

What to Study if You’re Repeating an ABPN Board Exam

October 30, 2023 by Jack Krasuski MD 6 Comments Categories: All Posts, How to Prepare For Your Board Exam Tags: beat the boards, board exam tips, Dr Jack Krasuski, how to prepare for the abpn exam, jack krasuski, psychiatry board exam, psychiatry board exam prep, psychiatry board prep, taking the abpn for the second time, what to do if i am taking the abpn for the second time, what to study if i am taking the abpn exam again

Repeating an ABPN board exam? If you’re studying for an ABPN board exam that you previously took and did not pass, the question you confront is how you should prepare this time around. Here’s the first important thing to do: Review your last board exam’s “Performance Profile,” that is, the list of exam scoring categories. Review your scores on the big categories (listed below). Any category which you failed or which you passed but not by much, should become your… Click to Read More

Should I Take a Combined ABPN Board Exam?

October 19, 2023 by Jack Krasuski MD 1 Comment Categories: All Posts Tags: abpn, ABPN board exam

If you’re reading this, it probably means you’re double or triple boarded and you’re struggling to decide whether to take a combined ABPN board exam or, instead, take the two or three individual exams in the specialty areas in which you’re seeking to maintain your board certification. I cannot decide for you, but I can lay out the pros and cons so you can make a more informed decision. Important Information About ABPN Combined Continuous Certification Exams Note, first,… Click to Read More

Why Taking a Board Review Course at the Last Minute is a Good Idea

September 6, 2023 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts, How to Prepare For Your Board Exam Tags: board exam, board exam prep, board test prep

I know I’m biased in favor of board review courses to help you prepare for board certification exams. After all, I started the Beat The Boards! courses and continue to present many lectures at several of them. Despite this, I think I can convince you of the wisdom of getting a board prep course, even if it’s last minute. Reason # 1: There Is No Downside to Getting a Board Review Course At least when it comes to the Beat… Click to Read More

Should I Maintain My Board Certification for as Long as I Practice?

June 30, 2023 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts, Board Certification Tags: board certification, board-certified physician, medical board preparation

My answer for myself is: Yes, I would always maintain my board certification for as long as I see patients. I would not practice with lapsed board certification. Here I present my reason – yes, I have only one reason to remain board certified. This medical-legal reason is relevant to and resonates with me. It may or may not be relevant or resonate with you, but I think it’s good for you to at least be aware of it as… Click to Read More

How to Pace Yourself on ABPN Board Exams with Linked Vignettes

September 9, 2022 by Jack Krasuski MD 1 Comment Categories: All Posts, How to Prepare For Your Board Exam, Strategies to Deploy During the Board Exam Tags: exam performance challenges, medical board preparation, perfectionism

Question: “Dr. Jack, how do you recommend pacing ourselves during the clinical vignette sections of the ABPN board exam? You mentioned aiming for 70 seconds a question but how would that work if there is a long vignette question stem or a 2-3-minute-long video?” This is a great question and I’ll answer it here (and then move on to address a larger question): Not every medical board exam question takes the same amount of time to answer. The pace at… Click to Read More

A Perfectionism That Will Kill Your Exam Performance

August 12, 2022 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts, How to Prepare For Your Board Exam, Strategies to Deploy During the Board Exam Tags: exam performance challenges, medical board preparation, perfectionism

This week we completed our 5-Day Psychiatry Board Prep Course in Chicagoland. (It was great to see and speak with so many colleagues there.) At the course, I received several questions from our attendees about what turned out to be a single problem described in different ways. The problem is a manifestation of one type of perfectionism. It arises as a feeling of a strong need to get complete and/or definitive information about a case described in an exam case… Click to Read More

The World’s Biggest USMLE Step 2 ck QBank Now Available

June 4, 2021 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts Tags: USMLE, USMLE step 2, USMLE step 2 ck

Our QBank team has been hard at work over the last several months developing, compiling, and vetting our new USMLE Step 2 ck QBank. It’s not just any old QBank though – it’s the world’s largest QBank for the USMLE Step 2ck exam. It includes 4,200+ multiple-choice questions written specifically for the USMLE Step 2CK exam. Because of the quality of these exam-reflective MCQs with explanations, we guarantee that users of The Pass Machine USMLE Step 2CK exam pass their… Click to Read More

How Not to Lose Your Mind When Preparing for Your Boards

March 24, 2021 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts, How to Prepare For Your Board Exam Tags: board exam stress, effective board exam study, minimizing pre-exam worry, stress-control, worry vs. study

If you engage in the behaviors below, you are in danger of losing your mind while in the process of preparing for your board exam. You spend more time worrying about the board exam than studying for it You keep buying more and more board exam prep resources when you’ve barely made a dent in the materials you already have In this post my goal is to help you not lose your mind, that is, to keep your board exam… Click to Read More

How to Prepare for Board Exams When Time Is Short

February 8, 2021 by Jack Krasuski MD 2 Comments Categories: All Posts, How to Prepare For Your Board Exam

Irrespective of how much time you have available to study for your board exam, you need to prioritize your activities. However, the shorter your available time, the more prioritization gains in importance. An additional challenge looms when time is short: even when maintaining discipline and attending to identified priorities, it is easy to let anxious feelings and ruminative worry thoughts distract you from maintaining that necessary discipline. Here’s how to prepare for board exams when time is short. There are… Click to Read More

Advice While Waiting for Your Medical Board Results

November 8, 2019 by Jack Krasuski MD 3 Comments Categories: All Posts Tags: american physician institute, beat the boards, board exam test results, failing board exam, jack krasuski, passing board exam, waiting for board exam, waiting for board exam test results

We’ve had tens of thousands of physicians take our board prep courses and this is what I learned about the weeks waiting for exam results: there is a weak relationship between how you think you did on the exam and whether you passed. Hundreds of times, exam-takers have emailed me feeling terrible about how “horribly” they did, only to find out that they passed. It’s normal to leave an exam feeling uncertain or discouraged. This occurs because: Often the biggest… Click to Read More

Does the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology Exam Test on Landmark Studies?

September 12, 2019 by Jack Krasuski MD Leave a Comment Categories: All Posts, How to Prepare For Your Board Exam Tags: abpn exam guidelines, abpn landmark studies, apbn, apbn testing landmark studies, beat the boards, Dr Jack Krasuski

We’ve received a question on whether the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology exam (ABPN) includes testing on landmark studies in their field. We reached out to ABPN for clarification, but they did not confirm nor deny a focus on landmark studies. Thus, I fall back on my own and our clients’ extensive experience in taking ABPN exams. In short, I’ve neither heard of nor experienced ABPN directly testing on landmark studies. For example, there will not be questions such… Click to Read More