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
Diagnostically Focused Questions on Psychiatry Boards
Below is a transcript of the video – it has been edited for clarity.
Today I am going to discuss diagnostically focused questions on the psychiatry boards. 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… Click to Read More
How to Study for Board Exams More Effectively
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.
Differentiating Diagnoses on Psychiatry Board Exams
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… Click to Read More
Recognizing Zebras in Clinical Vignettes
The medical boards pride themselves on presenting multiple-choice questions that are clinically-relevant and fair. In other words, the boards are not trying to trick you. This means that most clinical vignettes will describe patients with a common form of a disease or disorder. After all, these are the cases most of us physicians spend our days assessing and treating. However, as clinicians we do need to recognize the rare condition. So the question is, how do you distinguish whether the… Click to Read More
Treatment Algorithms on Board Exams
Medical board exams primarily test clinical knowledge. As such, questions that assess your knowledge of treatment interventions are common. There are three aspects of treatment that can be tested:
Details of specific treatment interventions
Treatments in specific populations and by disease variants
Treatment algorithms
Treatment algorithms on board exams are the focus of this post. Treatment algorithms are a rank ordering of treatment interventions beginning with first-line treatments proceeding to second-, third-, and fourth-line treatments, and ending at last-line treatments… Click to Read More






