ABOS Part I preparation

Any recommendations for board review courses or materials? I'd be curious to hear from those who have experience with or have heard about the Miller Review Course, AAOS Review Course, Osler etc.

I read the lastest OKU and Miller review the month before the test and did fine. I also went to the single day review course at the academy and bought the tapes and listened to those in the car for a couple of months as well.

To help you know where you stand with respect to your OITE performance (in terms of percent correct at least):

2007 Part I Boards:
Passing score - 68.2% correct
Overall passing rate: 87.3%
US/Canadian grads 1st time passing rate: 95.1%
US/Canadian grads repeat passing rate: 39.8%

wnl

Just my humble opinion:

Must Do:
Miller's review book. Read through this twice (cover to cover). It's like First Aid for Step I of the USMLE. I.E. just memorizing that book will get you a pass.

The self-assessment exams on CD from the Academy. Went back about 5 years with these. . . . . .much farther and you're getting out of the standard of care. THERE WERE QUESTIONS ON THE BOARDS THAT WERE ALMOST VERBATIM!!!!!!

Helpful but not necessary:
The ortho hyperguide (stryker). Ask your stryker rep about this. Just another source for questions. You can log on to the net and do this in between cases, clinic patients, or ED consults. You can only write so many questions. The more questions you do, the more likely you are to cover a potential topic.

Waste of time and/or money
OKU - Very wordy, w/o much substance or hi yield info. Tried to do this at first, and bailed shortly thereafter.

AAOS review course (Frassica - chicago): If your department is paying for it, go. I dished out the $1200 tuition and the money for room and board and was piled 3 deep in a hotel room for 4 days. For me it wasn't worth it. Was 5 weeks before the exam and I think it was pretty low yield. Only thing that was taught very well was Tumor, hand, and spine. Things that I got very well in residency to begin with. Again, if your program pays - go.

Reviewing the abstracts from the past 5 years of JBJS. If you do this, you'll be sorry. Very sorry. Extremely low yield.

Again, just my opinion. And as for the OITE don't sweat it. . . . . . . . . . .unless you're routinely scoring in the single digit percentiles. There's some loose correlation with your 4th and 5th year scores, but I think that's a crock of poop. My OITE scores varied greatly with the rotation I was on directly preceding it. When I was on something hard (spine or trauma), my scores sucked. When I had time to study for it, I blew it up. THE BOARDS ARE NOT THE OITE. The OITE tried to trick you. The boards were very fair. Hard, but fair. My OITE scores ranged from 13th - 93rd percentile. I was all over the place. Did very well on the Boards. That's why I think the OITE is crap.

Just my opinion.

in agreement with the post above for the most part, except maybe millers (hate that book). one additional truly high yield resource is the first-aid book, very much similar to first-aid for step I. it was around 200 pages, contain almost zero extraneous stuff, and can be "read" from cover to cover in about 2 days. it appears that almost all of the info was extracted out of self-assessment tests and the miller review course (cd set).

i used that book, self-assessment tests (last 3-4 years), miller cd set, and sforp site's oite questions. my oite scores varied greatly from 30th to well above 90th percentile. i have about 1/100000000000th of the attention span required for a review course, so there was no point to go to one.

key to the whole test...the pass rate. however, blows to be the other 5%.

the current miller is dated and largely a waste of time.
the aaos course is high yield in tumor and a few other areas, low yield in others.
miller cds are high yield
self assessments are high yield.