End of Rotation Exam

[Empowred]

Hello ,

 

I just finished my emergency medicine rotation. had a blast and got very good evaluations, but I barely passed the EOR exam as i hardly had time to study with roations and a toddler. My question is how imp is to get a high score in these exams & how do you prepare for them? Thank you.

[rev ronin]

1) Not very, but it depends on your program.  Unless you're looking for some sort of a residency, your PA school GPA does not matter to anyone.

2) Review the content with whatever means works best for you.  Reading, flash cards, etc. except that you may not have a study group available during rotations.

 

Never shirk from more time in clinic/hospital/whatever in order to study for EOR exams.

[Max PA17]

If you have PAEA exams, look at the blueprints, make study guides.. that's what I did. Did fine on all my rotation exams with that method. Eventually you'll start seeing overlap. The more you do, the easier they get. In my opinion EM was the toughest.

 

And I agree with rev, the only score that matters is the one that is considered passing.

 

 

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[gbrothers98]

These exams are constructed to be summative, so provide an overall assessment of your knowledge in each specialty. Gaining summative knowledge in a broad area such as Emed after 4-6 weeks is near impossible. That is why the national mean for this exam is approx 74 with an SD of 9 points. Majority of students will score between 65 & 83 respectively. So not a high scoring affair.

 

What is important is the relationship of EORE with PANCE passage. There are 2 studies and several presentations I have seen that correlate an average of all 7 EORE at or above raw score 68 with a higher likelihood of scoring 400 or above on PANCE. Note, this is not a guarantee, just a higher likelihood. There is a data subset averaging the EM, surg, IM & FM exam at raw score 69 or above also indicating the same. 

 

My recommendation would be to strive for those scores at a minimum. Programs are all over the map with these scores, scaling occurs along with determining an acceptable raw score. I am familiar with programs that set a raw score of 70 or 80 as a pass/no pass. Remediation and retesting may occur if not achieving those cut off points. Alternatively, a program may scale a raw score and inflate enough to provide a false sense of medical knowledge acquisition. The OP should be aware of what his/her program is doing and consider performance within that parameter.

 

I agree that clinical experience is a very important component during the clinical year. I also think that students have to meet the expectations of their programs. If an expectation is to achieve a certain score on an EORE as a proxy to indicate gaining medical knowledge to be a success on the PANCE, then that needs to be balanced with clinical time. 

 

One struggle that I think needs to be addressed for students is the breadth of these exams. Looking at the topic list for EM, there are 4 pages with approx. 50 topics each. Associated with each of these topics are 7 task areas. Math = 1400 potential areas of questioning. That is similar to asking a student to know everything about Emed after one rotation. Not possible. Students would be better served by a more focused topic list and blueprint to isolate the essential areas of Emed rather than encouraging a trivial pursuit approach. My 2 cents.

 

George

[Tori]

For most of my rotations I would use the topic list and read through most the topics in Pance Prep Pearls. I scored mid-80s on every EOR. 

 

However, I do agree with the above that the topic lists for certain rotations (EMED, Inpatient, Primary Care) are so broad that they aren't super useful. And without a doubt there will be questions that come from outside the topic list. In these cases I found the blue print more useful and would read through the topics on the bigger sections. I also really liked the question books "Pretest" for these rotations. I would bring them with me and during down time work through a few questions. 

 

I made it a point to take the first 3 weeks of a rotation to just focus on my rotation and only study cases I saw that day or things my preceptor told me to look up. Then the 4th week of rotations I would begin working through the topic list.  

[samhamiam]

On 6/13/2017 at 8:42 AM, Tori said:

For most of my rotations I would use the topic list and read through most the topics in Pance Prep Pearls. I scored mid-80s on every EOR. 

 

However, I do agree with the above that the topic lists for certain rotations (EMED, Inpatient, Primary Care) are so broad that they aren't super useful. And without a doubt there will be questions that come from outside the topic list. In these cases I found the blue print more useful and would read through the topics on the bigger sections. I also really liked the question books "Pretest" for these rotations. I would bring them with me and during down time work through a few questions. 

 

I made it a point to take the first 3 weeks of a rotation to just focus on my rotation and only study cases I saw that day or things my preceptor told me to look up. Then the 4th week of rotations I would begin working through the topic list.  

What books are these "pretest" exactly and how do I get them? Test taking is challenging for me so this would help I feel! 

[d-wade]

New dad here with a 2 month old during my EM rotation. I did a lot of Rosh Review, and listened to the Rosh Cast EM podcasts which had tons of high yield questions. When you're answering questions probe for potential weak areas and work on them. The blueprints are ok, but sometimes are a bit too vague, really try to think of what's high yield - this will get easier as you take more exams

[Pastudent463]

I'm in my 8th rotation right now and my method has been to take the Rosh Review boost exam for that EOR at the begging and then read through my wrong answers. Go through the topic list starting at the highest yield topics getting as far as I  can before the exam (most of the time I  only get through 50-70%), then take the boost exam from rosh again at the end. Also sometimes supplement with onlinemeded for topics I  need help with. I've scored 88% and above on all PAEA EOR's so far with this method. 

[SHU-CH]

The most common mistake I see students make is not practicing recall. If you want to get good at something you have to practice it. An exam tests your ability to recall, so you need to recall when you study. 

I have seen many students use reading as their study strategy. They read through the material 100 times. They get to the point where they are very fluent with the material. They know what is on the next page. They know what is in the blue box on the upper corner of the right hand page. This cause them to feel like they know the material very well. 

When it comes time to take the exam, they can recall exactly where the fact is on the page, but they can remember the fact itself. This is because they have not practiced recalling the fact. Use flashcards, use apps, use classmates, use whatever, but make sure you practice recall. 

And always remember: standardized exams are a pretty dumb measure of how good a clinician you will be.