Hi, come on in. I'm Dr. Pravin Shukle. We're going to be talking about boardsmanship, which is
the skill in writing exams. You know, as a doctor, you're going to be writing exams for the rest
of your life. I wrote my very first board exam about 15 to 20 years ago now and I re-wrote my
last one about 3 years ago for my Echo boards. We will be writing exams as doctors all the time
because we write our board exams, we write our specialty exams, we write sub-specialty
exams, we write certification exams like echocardiography for example and we re-certify 10
years later. So 10 years later I re-wrote my Internal Medicine exams or my Echo boards. So
learning how to write exams in an integral part of being a doctor. Let's talk about you and your
exam. The United States Medical Licensing Exam is probably the first exam that you're going to
be writing as a medical student. What are your advantages and how are you different from
graduates 25 years ago like me? Well, first of all you're able to process information a lot faster
than we were. You require more frequent evaluations and that's why we changed the medical
school curriculum to reflect the way that you learn. You're more independent in the way that
you learn. When I was a student, we used to sit in a classroom for 8 hours a day and listen to
lectures all day and attendance was mandatory. Today, most of you are actually looking at the
videos of the lectures and watching them at double speed. You rely on multimedia and video to
learn as well. Now there's a downside to this. You do have a shorter attention span, it's about
8 minutes based on the recent research and you're less reliant on reading as a learning
strategy because you've grown up with multi-modality learning. So where does this leave you?
Well, the good news is is that you have the ability, as I said before, to absorb the complex
information much faster than we did where it took me 4 hours to understand the Embryology
and Development in the first 12 weeks, it will take you 5 minutes. You have less ability than our
generation to sit in an exam and communicate that knowledge because let's face it, those exams
are still stuck in the 19th century. So my job is to help you write that exam. I am going to give
you some of those skills that we acquired over time and I'm going to help you avoid any of the
pitfalls that tend to trap students. Let's talk about a strategy on how to study for your exams.
I think the first step is to take a look at your curriculum in your medical school. Now start
early with your review. Starting in about 9 months before your board exam is the best and if
possible that would be the way to go. Remember questions, questions, questions. So study by
doing questions over and over again. Don't worry if you get all of them wrong the first time
you start. Go back and do more questions later. Keep going back to the Lecturio question bank
as we add more and more questions each month that will help you study. Now after you've
done all of the questions, do them again. Read the question stem again. Now remember that
questions may vary but learning points don't. So you may see a different question asking the
same thing but in a different format. The learning points don't change. Now, if you get a
question wrong that's an excellent point for learning because I want you to do that same
question again next week because learning a wrong answer is something that happens if you
only do the question once and if you write that same exam say 3 months later and you're
under pressure you may not remember which is the right answer and which is the wrong but if
you get a wrong answer during practice and you do the same question next week and you read
the answer and you read why all of the other choices are wrong it will be burned into your
brain and you'll do much better on the exam.