Viewing By Entry / Main
November 14, 2004
Shelf Exam

Evidently the 7 hours it takes me to write a  blog is not truly appreciated by the vast majority of those who vote.  I mean, WOW, 3.2pts for finding the best articles on chronic pain management, that hurts. C'est La Vie,...I'm over it, no hurt feelings and thanks to those who read and voted.

However, with the upcoming shelf exam and my confidence low in my ability to do well, I decided to give you all what you want in the hopes of a higher grade Do shelf exams accurately refelct knowledge and skill?

1.This article is my favorite. It finds subjective evaluation of surgical knowledge by faculty and residents correlates poorly with performance measured objectively via shelf exams.  They interprited this information to mean that subjective and oral evaluations should not be used to evaluate students.  I took this to mean shelf exams may be less suited to evaluation.  

2.  This article says that we actually do learn what is on the shelf exam in our rotations,...generally.   I know I didn't hear about Osgood-Schlatter Lesion in the office and certainly didn't expect to.

3. Well then, maybe we are being taught in the wrong way.  Maybe we should have strictly a problem based approach?  The jury is still out.

4. More bad news,  those who take the family medicine boards after internal medicine due better. (big surprise)

5. We do have one great thing going for us, as this article points out. Evidently, community preceptor clerkship rotations provide as well and sometimes better educational experience as noted on standardized test (step 2) as those trained in the hospital.

So don't worry...., the shelf will be hard ......, but its part of the process and helps those who have a large knowledge base but have difficulty applying it to a clinical situation. Good luck on Friday.

Posted At : 5:26 PM. | Link | Rotation 2 04-05 | Comments (12)

Current Rating:
(3.9)

Comments

Mike, thanks for the articles. I think it's interesting that objective exams correlate poorly with subjective evaluations, but it's hard to know what to do with this info. For example, if objective tests aren't used, as you suggest, wouldn't students with more charasmatic, outgoing personalities benefit at the expence of others? Wouldn't there be some students who may not speak up on rounds and such with vast knowledge bases that would lose out?

Posted By Jonathan Cahill / Posted At 11/14/04 6:39 PM

MIke .. you're kidding .. right? 7 hours? I hope it's really more like 7 minutes. ;-)

Posted By Jacob Reider / Posted At 11/14/04 8:24 PM

an .. um .. how it this information Patient oriented??

Posted By Jacob Reider / Posted At 11/14/04 8:26 PM

Well this was entertaining and I tried to bump up that score for you. How they teach us in medical school is really interesting...I wonder if it will change in the future...I bet.

Posted By John Mastrangelo / Posted At 11/14/04 9:07 PM

I had to give you a good score for the observed information. I too noticed this sad scoring trend. With the increasing effort I put into my blog I got decreasing scores. I spent many hours on the blog too. Oh well.

Posted By Alicia Tucker / Posted At 11/14/04 10:36 PM

I do believe you that you spent a ton of time for your posts, just looking at how you laid out all the relevant studies.

Posted By Nahee Lee / Posted At 11/14/04 10:50 PM

It's about time someone stood up to the man. Nice one.

Posted By Paul Husson / Posted At 11/15/04 7:24 AM

I learned about Osgood schlatter in the office the other day...I think you have gone wacky. Oh and yesterday I spent an hour and 30 minutes just to find one article that had full text. It makes me angry. I don't like being angry.

Posted By Jeffrey Klauser / Posted At 11/15/04 10:21 AM

The best blog yet!!!!

Posted By Camele / Posted At 11/15/04 8:04 PM

Mike, the articles that you selected were interesting. It is amazing to me how varied the research out there can be! Thanks for the words of encouragement. It was fun bloggin' with ya!

Posted By Kathleen Fraga / Posted At 11/15/04 10:57 PM

Thanks for the great blog! A FP residency director once told me that work ethic and personality counted for a lot more than test results because you could have high test scores but not do well with people (ie - patients didn't trust them). As Paul said last theme, we all need to put some love into our work. :-)

Posted By Robin Holzer / Posted At 11/18/04 4:23 PM

Hopefully, based on your evidence, we'll ace the internal medicine shelf, b/c that FP shelf was hard.

Posted By Jomol Cyriac / Posted At 11/22/04 1:51 PM