what did you guys think of the boards

i thought the biggest surprise was the distribution of various topics, much heavier on spine and peds than i expected

i thought the overall subject breakdown was similar to OITE (slightly more spine, less joints)
But the questions were very different. Very few recall-type questions (although at least 3 were from prior OITEs)
A lot of the questions were complicated and required some real thought under what felt like a lot of time pressure (at least for me.) Most of the peds was not at all straight-forward.

Unlike the OITE most questions could not be narrowed down to the right answer -- the 'distrators' were in many cases plausible answers if you didn't know your stuff cold.

I felt some of the questions were poorly written (which may just mean that I didn't understand what I needed to, but others agreed with me on the questions I'm thinking of.)

My opinion -- much harder than OITE. Just knowing 'the facts' that will get you a decent score on the OITE was in no way sufficient for this test.
I'll be sweating out waiting for my scores and haven't thrown away my notes.

I agree on the quality of the distractors, they were often very close to the right answer and you had to know your details

Funny, I have some different perspectives on the quiz.

I thought the morning was brutal and the afternoon was much more straightforward. I went the AAOS review course and it was very tumor centric, so when there was like two tumor questions on the first 161 questions, I got really nervous that i studied all the wrond stuff.

There were tons of spine and from someone doing a spine fellowship I thought the questions were unfair on many occasions. They show you one or two horribly grainy images and then give you three choices all of which would be completely acceptable treatments depending on what institution you were practicing.

I did not think it was possible for a test to have worse images than the OITE but the ABOS has topped it, and amazingly they did so in a landslide. I would say that fewer than half of the images were usable for answering the questions. Perhaps the board was trying to encourage us to evaluate patients without imaging, but the questions were tough. There were even a few that had no right answers or the images were not even of the right body part. You would think that for the most important test of your life (at 810 bucks a pop) they could proofread the questions before the day of the exam.

All that being said, don't panic. I did ok to well on the OITE (60s to high 70s) during residency and I felt the board exam was roughly equivalent in both difficulty and number of questions answered correctly.

I will say one thing that was most disconcerting was the total inaccuracy of the review courses on the content. I think the board wanted to throuw them for a loop or something. There was very little hand, tons of spine, much less tumor than usual, and probably nine questions on humerus fractures. Maybe I just got dazzled by the sheer importance of the test, but I thought I had prepared for a completely different exam than the one I got.

I'll let you know if I fail, but my advice would be to study what the review courses tell you and hope for the best.

i took the test last year and remembered it to be quite an ass whopping, but i had no problems passing. i haven't met one person who didn't feel the same way; even one of the most "confident" guy i know of who took the test 2 years prior admitted that it was a shellacking.

there are a couple of factors one needs to keep mind. one is the obvious 90something percent pass rate. the other is that, especially with exams like this with hundreds of questions, one tends to focus and dwell on about a dozen of so questions that he/she had problems with. don't forget about the other 150 that you breezed through (and hopefully arrived at the correct choice).

i was, like everyone else, very much disturbed by the horrendous images on the test. for my part 2 next year, i am going to bring in some hand drawn and painted films and mris, and maybe a few colonoscopy pics.

in the mean time, try to relax and wait for abos to take 5 months to come up with a score on a scantron sheet.

Finished the 1st section 1 hour ahead of schedule (never finish tests early). Was feeling SOOOOO good about myself that I actually bought some "victory ice cream" in the lobby to celebrate me owning that test.

Came back in the afternoon, and barely finished the test.

Thought the test was very fair. My chairman was the proctor and is the president elect of the ABOS. He told us a while ago that 60 or so questions are 'trial' questions that automatically get tossed any way. Those may be the questions that were totally off the wall. Also, he says by the time you write the questions, field test it, etc. each question costs about $2000. Yes, two thousand. It's a shame the test booklets were so poor quality considering this.

What about the lack of minutia on the test. All of those pediatric metabolic diseases, skeletal dysplasias, etc, etc. How funny is that.

Did Frassica's review course. If I had to do all over again, I wouldn't spend the money on the course, travel, and hotel costs.

Overall, echo the whole 90+ pass rate. With that said, I'll be in the 8% eating my freakin' words.