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How to Pace Yourself on ABPN Exams with Linked Vignettes

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Question: “Dr. Jack, how do you recommend pacing ourselves during the vignette sections of the 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 which one completes… READ MORE

A Perfectionism That Will Kill Your Exam Performance

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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 turns 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… READ MORE

How to Get the Most from Group Study for Board Exams

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Preparing for your board exam can be done alone or with a partner or group. (From now on, I’ll write ‘group’ when referring to group or single partner.) Studying in a group has several pros and cons, which I cover in this article. Depending on the learner, either the pros or the cons of group study can predominate. Thus, group study is not for everyone. For those for whom group study is a net positive, it can be the main… READ MORE

The World’s Biggest USMLE 2ck QBank Now Available

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Our QBank team has been hard at work over the last several months developing, compiling, and vetting our new USMLE Step 2ck 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 2ck… READ MORE

How Not to Lose Your Mind When Preparing for Your Boards

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If you engage in the behaviors below, you are in danger of losing your mind in the process of preparing for your board exam.  You spend more time worrying about the exam than studying for it You keep buying more and more 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 stress under control and instead expend… READ MORE

How to Prepare for Your Board Exam When Time is Short

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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. There are two ways to think about your available study time. Depending on… READ MORE

Advice When Waiting for Your Medical Board Exam Results

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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… READ MORE

Does the APBN Test on Landmark Studies?

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We’ve received a question on whether the APBN tests 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 nor experienced ABPN directly testing on landmark studies. For example, there will not be questions such as, “Which of the following results was found in… READ MORE

VIDEO: Why the Knowledge / Exam Performance Gap?

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 Below is a transcription of the video (it has been edited for clarity): Many physicians who do poorly on their boards feel frustrated by underperforming on their exam in relation to their medical knowledge and confused by not knowing how to fix this performance gap.  Here I explore the first of five contributors to medical board exam underperformance and provide solutions. Poor Focus on Exam Question Due to Anxiety One cause of poor board exam performance is a lack… READ MORE

VIDEO: Diagnostically Focused Questions on Psychiatry Board Exams

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 Below is a transcript of the video – it has been edited for clarity. Today I am going to discuss diagnostically focused questions in board exams. You want to recognize the core diagnostic features. There can be a challenge with these diagnostically focused questions as the DSM-5 has a lot of disorders and each disorder has quite a few criteria. These challenges can make it hard to learn all of the criteria for all these disorders, especially for the… READ MORE

VIDEO: What To Do If You Fail Your Board Exam

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I’m here to talk about a difficult topic with you today.  What do you do if you fail your board exam? I know that this is likely a difficult time for you, but I do not want you to be so hard on yourself. Take some time to come to terms with this and then create an action plan for how you are going to do better next time. There is a silver lining when it comes to failing your board exam because we are more than passing or failing an exam.

VIDEO: How to Study More Effectively

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Today, I focus on how to study more effectively based on the Landscape of Knowledge. I categorize new information we learn into three tiers of understanding: data, information, and knowledge. A exam candidate can fool themselves into believing they understand the material through familiarity with it even when they haven’t converted it into knowledge through active learning. Here are specific examples that illustrate these points.

How Stress Can Ruin Your Board Scores

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Stress can you ruin your board scores. It sounds like a cliché but actually it is true! Stress leads to fight, flight, or freeze scenarios. When our autonomic nervous systems are out of balance, we can go into overdrive or we can freeze up completely depending upon whether the adrenergic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system is over-activated. Neither one of these is helpful for a good outcome in your test scores. Acute stress and chronic stress can both… READ MORE

VIDEO: 5 Tips to Minimize Procrastinating on Your Board Exam Studies

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 Welcome.  It’s Dr. Jack and I have 5 tips for you on how to minimize procrastination when it comes to studying for your board exam. Tip 1: De-Emotionalize the Job You Have to Do My first tip is based on a thought experiment.  I’d like you to take a minute to imagine that you have a clone of yourself, and your clone is identical to you.  They have the same bright smile and winning personality that you do.  There… READ MORE

Fear of Board Exam Failure

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Fear can make us behave in counterproductive ways, including how we respond to an upcoming medical board exam, such as a neurology or psychiatry board exam. We have set ways of responding to fear – fight, flight or freeze. Classically, fear is defined as an emotion triggered by imminent danger, as we would experience if we saw an aggressive person running toward us or if we heard breaking glass in our house as we were lying in bed. Anxiety is… READ MORE

Levels of Board Exam Questions

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One way I’ve found categorizing board exam questions helpful is to view them in a hierarchy of three levels, each one building on the previous one and requiring greater use of one’s clinical judgment. My three levels are: Know It →  Recognize It →  Decide It. Now let me explain and I promise this will be practically helpful and, I believe, comforting even. Know It This lowest level of question relies almost exclusively on recalling some specific piece of information… READ MORE

Screen Functions on ABPN® Board Exams

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Today I respond to two questions regarding the what information is available on the exam screen on ABPN® board exams. Lab Values on ABPN® board Exams I received a question from a psychiatry board exam candidate this week about whether normal lab values are available as a drop down list accessible from the exam screen. We received a response from ABPN® as follows: “We do not provide a drop down list of normal lab values, but when the committee feels… READ MORE

Differentiating Diagnoses on Psychiatry Board Exams

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Here’s an important board exam fact: you can study, study, and still further study the DSM-5 and still incorrectly answer diagnostically-focused psychiatry board exam questions. How can this be? If you have ever felt that your exam performance is not as good as your knowledge base suggests it should be, the following insight will partly explain this discrepancy. The discrepancy between knowledge and performance arises from a discrepancy between what you spend your time studying (and memorizing) and what the… READ MORE

Board Exam Study Procrastination

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I received a request from a colleague preparing for their psychiatry board exam. Today I tackle this fairly common problem by explaining procrastination, its formation and treatment. Procrastination is a type of avoidance, and avoidance is a common strategy used by many to cope with unpleasant life situations and also is part of several psychiatric conditions. Any disorder with “phobia” in its name is a type of avoidance. The problem with avoidance is that often it is counter-productive and makes… READ MORE

What To Study If You’re Repeating an ABPN Exam

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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 study priority. The thinking goes… READ MORE

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