One of the most common questions we receive at Beat The Boards! is: “How many hours should I devote to preparing for my board exam?”
On the one hand, I have a firm answer: 200 hours for a specialty exam and 150 for a subspecialty exam.
On the other hand, I have no answer at all. Vast differences in study time and effort exist among individual learners and for different exams. Instead, I have a way for you to arrive… Click to Read More
How to Study for Your ABPN Board Exam: Prioritize “the Big and the Bad” for Smarter Board Prep
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
Levels of Board Exam Questions
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… Click to Read More
Transforming Board Exam Question Data into Exam Performance
Have you ever had the experience of performing worse on a multiple-choice exam than you knew your knowledge base allowed? If so, this post is for you. To explain where the disconnect between how much you know and how you scored on a board exam may occur, I explain the relationship between four concepts: data, information, knowledge, and exam performance. I provide examples, and then invite you to consider where your “disconnect” in this chain of data processing occurs. Let’s… Click to Read More




