Board exam prep is challenging, especially in the few days or weeks before a board exam. It’s likely for exam candidates to feel a sense of urgency, questioning themselves whether they’re adequately prepared, and to feel the stress of having too little time to do what’s needed.
But that’s not all: it’s also common for that stress to lead to prep paralysis. It’s easy then to procrastinate, make half hearted efforts, or give up way too soon – just when effective and efficient prep is most needed!
The good news is that no matter how little time you have before the board exam, there’s still enough time to get much better prepared – and also to assess your preparedness, which then guides you through your remaining studies.
Let me present you two scenarios that can lead to ineffective study. I then present what you can (should!) do instead.
Scenario #1: Learning from QBank Only Prep
In this scenario, you’ve been preparing using a QBank only and somehow your performance either has improved very little or, even though improved, is still not good enough to likely pass.
This problem arises especially when you have knowledge deficits of a type that doing exam-style multiple choice questions isn’t enough.
What kind of knowledge deficits are these? Conceptual ones: lack of knowledge of the underlying mechanisms and relationships among the thousands of specific facts.
When you learn through QBanks, you are indeed learning: you’re learning thousands of specific pieces of information, each of which is a learning point that a question is designed to test. This is fine. I have no quarrel with learning through QBanks. Indeed, I recommend it.
However, it’s common that learning these thousands of facts does NOT lead to a consolidated understanding of that knowledge area. To get to a unified understanding and that often lead to an Aha! Moment, what’s needed is a lecture specially designed to present a coherent and integrated explanation of its topic.
So, what’s the solution: review integrated and coherent explanations of an entire topic area – so you know how all the thousands of individual facts fit together. This side-steps the problem of trying to memorize these thousands of facts.
One solution is what The Pass Machine courses offer: high-yield and highly structured lecture presentations that allow you to learn the subject matter deeply and cohesively as opposed to piecemeal through thousands of learning points all broken up into individual multiple choice questions and all mixed together in random order.
Learning from QBanks IS very effective once a learner already has the organized understanding of the subject and is now 1) simply learning more details and able to integrate those details into the structured whole of the topic and 2) improving their test-taking skills, by desensitizing to exam-like situations and by establishing their pacing to avoid running out of time on the real exam.
Scenario #2: Learning from Textbooks, Chapters, or Articles
In this scenario, you have been taking steps to learn those underlying mechanisms and the relationships among the thousands of relevant facts.
The problem here is that the sources of learning you’ve been using are perhaps highly inefficient. In fact, they can be so inefficient that they are woefully ineffective. Let me explain.
If you finished reading an entire text-book in your psychiatry or neurology specialty or subspecialty you would be highly knowledgeable. Except, of course, if you forgot much of what you learned because it was such a long and boring slog – a common curse when learning from textbooks.
But if you – miraculously – got through that entire textbook, you would have realized that about 80% of what you read was irrelevant to being prepared for your boards. Most of it would even be irrelevant to your clinical practice because most of what’s in a textbook is not actionable information.
In contradistinction, all the material in The Pass Machine course lectures is actionable and testable material.
The number of lecture hours in a course from The Pass Machine is in the dozens.
Although, this is a lot lecture material it is still possible to cover probably within a week and certainly over two weeks.
I would not advise doing a 30-50 hour lecture review in a single week, but sometimes you just have to do it. And if you really have to do it, then you should. The alternative is an increased risk failure, which just leads to having to start again next year.
My Advice When Time is Short
Do not give up.
Yes. You will be taking your board exam when it’s scheduled. After all, you’re unlikely to bail and you shouldn’t.
So, why admit defeat before the battle has begun when that decision to give up, one taken days or weeks before an exam, is to already assure your failure. Why assure failure when they are still days or weeks left for effective learning to take place before the exam?
You may say that you haven’t admitted defeat. Ok, but are you perhaps acting as if you are fated to fail? Perhaps you’re still going through the motions of studying. It’s not working well but at least you want to comfort yourself with the thought that you did the best you could.
But is doing what isn’t working really doing the best you can? No. It is not.
What’s the alternative: do what works!
Perhaps you already know what works for you. So do that while stopping the ineffective approaches.
What might those ineffective approaches be? Maybe group study, whether online or in person, in which a lot of complaining and catching up occurs but not much knowledge and test-taking skill gets advanced.
Now, if you don’t know what works, I’m here to tell you: The Pass Machine Courses work.
Of course, I’m biased. Of course, I have skin in the game.
But keep this in mind: anyone who buys and actually uses a course from The Pass Machine and fails their exam gets more than their money back. (This is, btw, another way I have skin in the game: I lose when you lose. I win only when you win. I designed the guarantee this way to keep us honest over here.)
Learn More About The Pass Machine Courses
When time to a board exam is short is when The Pass Machine review courses especially shine. They are designed to let you gain mastery over exam material at the depth needed to pass your ABPN® exam with confidence – and to do so quickly. Let me lay this out.
Here is the link to The Pass Machine home page. Choose your course of interest. Check out the pass rates, testimonials, number of lecture hours, size of the QBank, sales discount, group purchase options, etc.
Yours in Exam Success,
Jack Krasuski, MD
American Physician
