My views on negative marking MCQ exams

This should be obvious - you would think...

Being a man, I chose to answer all questions and deal with the consequences later.

In negative marking best of five MCQ exams, this has probably not proven the best technique in terms of mark scoring. My worst scores were from taking on questions I had a 1 in 4 or 5 chance of knowing, and the MCQ I was doing had a 0.25 mark penalty per wrong question.

One should have known that with this maths, that I shouldn't have risked a 1 in 5 chance with a 0.25 mark deduction.

I recently got to try out saying 'i don't know' and it seems that that paid off.

I wonder what your techniques might be?

More Medical School Interview Techniques

Here is another extract from my previous site

I will try to work out what works and does not

I will evaluate in future posts the importance of each of these

Remember that questions can be asked in each of these areas.

Please visit my broken - not really functioning website that i have loaded on here - however, information should be available here www.examinationmedicine.com

1. Leadership (some very detailed background reading)
2. Team work - University of Kent detailed information
3. Stress - BUPA patient information leaflet
4. Rapport - from an NLP perspective - you can read more if you're interested - fascinating subject (NLP = neurolinguistic programming)
5. Conflict Management in a Medical Setting - this link is broken - i will try to fix
6. Research and Audit and distinguishing them - this link is broken - i will try to fix
7. Evidence Based Medicine - use this Wikipedia page for a simple explanation
8. Capacity and Consent and the Mental Health Act
9. Download a great NHS Guide here.(PDF file) - we would encourage this as essential reading containing summarised information about (NHS structure, DoH, PCTs, SHAs, Commisioning, Finance, NHS and IT, Finance, Darzi, Clinical Governance, Quality, NICE, NHS in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland)

Look what I found - i wonder if this still works - do you fancy checking it out? Thanks for your generosity!

Feel free to donate here

 

Medical Examination MCQs, AMK, AKT

In our work in medicine, we tend to get involved with medical schools and their examinations. In fact, recently scored 84.5% on the most recent medschool MCQ exam - unfortunately, lower than the other 2 doctors - one of whom works with me! As a general rule, we are told GPs score better than hospital doctors.

In the hope of helping any of you readers through these exams, these are my techniques. After all, I find too much preoccupation with worrying about these exams and not enough time focusing on actually learning the hands on medicine. Once you have the exam technique, do what is really more important. See patients.

Preparation, preparation, preparation. To get to medical school and pass your exams, did you study from the text book, or did you do question, after question, after question? Nights and nights of trying to work out a pattern so that the next time you saw the question, you would recognise it and what to do about it. I did, and I think a lot of you did. They say 'past performance is not an indicator of future performance' but it is the best indicator.

So, what I do know about Multiple Choice Exams in Medicine is that they are all becoming the same. I have done practice questions and exams from the USA, Canada, and the UK. What if I told you that most of the Canadian LMCC examination questions came from USMLE Step 2 questions, and that international question banks use questions from various countries, all coming back to USMLE questions? Yes, why would you study anything else? Go to the source. The reason for this? It is big business in the USA, there is one standardised exam with a lot of rich people in a litigious country, and there is lots of data and investment in setting and marking these questions. 

If you get a chance, please try to purchase the infamous Goljan Lectures. He talks brilliantly of the way questions are set and that there are more clues than just one for each question to lead you to the right answer. Or the most likely answer...

I will give you the title of the best USMLE revision book I can recommend :

This is just a revision book of complete papers. From this, you will get an idea of which questions are repeated, and the answers at the end of the book will teach you how to answer a similar question with a different answer.

For example, my favourite question is the one about 

' An overweight 14  year-old boy playing basketball (or other sport) who suddenly complains of hip pain and presents with a limp'

This then leads to a choice of what the diagnosis is, or what to do next, or the X-ray appearances of the condition.

Of course, the answer will be Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis. However, one of the choices is bound to be Perthes Disease, and others may be fracture, infection, irritable hip, sickle cell aseptic necrosis. This would account for all the causes of a limp in a child and they will no longer need to assess you about children and hips as you would know it all. A perfect question for every exam.

I will follow up soon with more tips etc

Medical school interview Tips

I used to run, together with my friend Dr Kazmi, a medical school interview course known as Medschool Academy - you might have heard of us. The story of our disappearance - we had children and  our careers started booming - maybe it was the confidence starting the course gave us at interviews and life in general. It was truly a rewarding experience. The other problem was while all this was going on, I stopped paying for the website and it died a death. I thought I'd share some or all of our content gradually here over the next few weeks to months. This is an extract from our web page. Can you believe that I created everything in about 3 nights, learning how to program html tables - i know, very bad idea, but it was about 6 years ago.

FREE Medical School Interview Question Tips and Techniques

The following are the author's personal thoughts and opinions and in no way reflect the views of any institution or the medical profession.  

Medicine is becoming more competitive and for the first time, medical students are facing the very real prospect of unemployment on becoming a doctor. 

People applying to medical school seem to be getting better and of a higher standard. Almost all students that succeed at interview have had significant voluntary experience or life experiences related to caring or medicine. This is a hint to make sure that potential applicants should get involved in as much voluntary/medical work as possible - and reflect upon how this has affected your career decision. If you feel you do not have enough time to do this, you are not making time for it like you should, so this may count against you.

 As new doctors  are finding it so difficult now to find jobs, it is likely that as medical students, they will have to partake in as much voluntary medical work / electives as possible and perhaps consider an intercalated BSc degree or research degrees as well to get ahead in the shortlisting process for training places in their specialties of choice - perhaps just as much extra work as medical school applicants do now in preparation for the medical school of their choice.

 Interviews for Admissions into medical school have become more transparent and feedback can be obtained now for unsuccessful applicants. This could mean that to be more transparent, universities will start to adopt a more structured approach to interviews.

 Medical Examinations have gone this way with OSCEs (Objective Structured Clinical Examinations) becoming the standard way of examining practical skills such as history taking and physical examination.

 This will hopefully discourage extremely difficult lateral thinking questions which may well leave students feeling victimised - unless everyone is asked the same question from a pool of questions.

Medschool Academy Medical School Interview Tips 

• Speak to as many people as possible about interview questions that they have had - the more recent the better. 

• Practice these interview questions. Do this just as you would revise for any exams using past questions.  

• Ask a senior doctor to answer these questions. Personally, the more junior the doctors are, the less likely we feel they are to appreciate the important depth and breadth of answers that give us a true insight into the caring nature of the candidate and the capacity the candidate will have to handle medicine as a profession in the future. 

• Be prepared for other questions. 

• Use the internet if you can - it is an essential resource! Get questions, medical school information, see forums, read books, but be warned, like many things in medicine, a lot of them are outdated. 

• Please dress well - you are not cool with your shirt not tucked in and your tie loose, and if you are, it is likely that interviewers can't tell!  

• Learn communication skills with someone who knows these - use the internet for lists as there very good sites out there. We recommend Google as a search engine. 

• Go the next step - go to a course.

Educational and Interview courses do cost a lot more once you're a doctor.

Good Luck!