Written Qualifying Exam

Integrative Reviewing And Some Other Review Ideas

As we get close to another cycle of exams, deciding on how and what to review can be more challenging than the effort of reviewing.

Realistically, there is no feasible way to cram the whole of ophthalmic knowledge in the next 1-3 months to perform well on an exam. Hopefully this time is spent reviewing and solidifying knowledge we’ve accumulated previously, and not attempting to learn concepts for the first time!

So as you gear up for this next cycle of studying, here are a few ideas on how to review:

Study Methods Preferred By Ophthalmology Learners

Background

There are a wide variety of options for learning ophthalmology now. There are more textbooks and review books available now than ever before; podcasts, YouTube channels, and many other forms of media also provide new streams of innovative content.

Over the last 6-7 years since I started Ophthalmology Review, I’ve enjoyed trying different methods of developing useful content - from directly translating my notes from residency, to creating tables and picmonics, writing review articles, etc. - I’m constantly thinking of how to teach the incredible field of ophthalmology.

However, sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what people find most useful, and what may be helpful for one person may not be for another. So in my continuous search for content ideas, I wanted to know what study tools the readers of this website find most helpful.

Ophthalmology Study Topic Checklist

Check out a new resource I’ve created - a checklist that covers over 3000+ topics in ophthalmology, with page references from the latest editions of the Basic and Clinical Science Course, Review of Ophthalmology, and Kanski’s Clinical Ophthalmology! If you’re having a hard time getting started with learning/studying ophthalmology or want a handy way of making sure you’ve covered the high-yield topics in ophthalmology, this tool may be really helpful!

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Mini-Atlas

I’m working on some review courses that may be helpful in your studies! One of the things I think is critical for learning and reviewing ophthalmology is having ample amounts of images that can help solidify your pattern-recognition, since ophthalmology is a very visually-oriented specialty (no pun intended).

So as part of my work on creating the course, I am curating as many freely-available images as I can find. While some are completely free to use, other images are free to use for educational purposes (via Creative Commons licenses and the like).

You can find the images here. While it’s not meant to become an atlas like some other great sites out there, hopefully it can serve as yet another resource for finding high-quality images for various diseases you’re trying to look up.

It’s been a very slow process, but I plan to add more links and images as I go. If there’s a topic you’d like me to focus on, let me know in the comments section or contact me!

Studying After Failing A Test

I’ve been humbled by the many people who have had the courage to contact me over the past few years to ask my advice on preparing for various exams. I don’t claim to be an expert at the various exams, but I do want to help my fellow colleagues succeed in any way possible, and if this website helps more people fare better on their tests and also become better ophthalmologists, that’s great.

Phakomatoses: Overview

Phakomatoses are a multidisciplinary category of systemic diseases that is often tested for a multitude of reasons.  Although the incidence of these conditions is fairly low (though chances are you will see at least 1 case of many of these conditions), there are many ocular findings that need to be considered.

I've been debating how to organize this information in a useful manner for review for quite some time.  The subject material is pretty massive, and each condition could easily take several articles (and probably eventually will).  But I wanted to make sure there was a useful review out there on this subject before the written board exam, in case the test covers one of these conditions.

Conditions With Increased Risk Of Glaucoma

This review is somewhat multi-disciplinary in nature. As you wrap up your reviews, one of the things I found useful was to create tons of different lists. Regardless of which test you're studying for, there are many questions that are organized differently than how one might go about learning a particular disease. As such, I started making lists of different ways to group otherwise disparate diseases that might show up as a test question, or at least help me remember a specific feature of the disease.

Article Review: Top Resources For OKAP And Board Review

Dr. James G. Chelnis contributed an article to the American Academy of Ophthalmology listing 9 very useful resources for OKAP and board exam review.  His article can be found here (this may be member-only content).

I don't have any critiques of the resources he lists; from what I can tell, there is no specific order to his recommendations.  If you used all 9 resources, I suspect you would do very well.

Out of that list, I personally used the following resources when I studied for the OKAP and board exams:

Another Approach To OKAP Study

When I started looking on Google for helpful guides for OKAP or board exam study, a thread on studentdoctor.net was listed towards the top.

In the thread, the original poster presented a very thorough and detailed plan of attack for studying ophthalmology in his (I apologize, I'm assuming that the user is a "he" due to the username) first year of residency (PGY-2), including a specific reading schedule, reviews of textbooks and question banks, with links to different articles for additional reading.  In some ways, it sounds eerily like what I'm trying to put together on this site.