Just a quick post to brag about my wife. I wrote awhile back about passing my in-training exams for the first time after taking it for three years, how hard they are and how great that is. When my wife took her first in-training exam for family medicine at her residency, she (understatedly) told me that she did very well. Back when she first told me about how well she did, all she said was that everybody was really surprised at how amazing she did on it, that she scored in a very narrow percentile of all 1st years in the nation. What I didn't realize (and she didn't tell me) until today was not only did she do "well", but that she had passed her test on her first year, which is basically unheard of. Not only that but she goes on to lament (she's actually complaining) that over the passed 3 years she has gotten worse at the test and now has scored 40 points lower than when she was an intern...yet when I ask her if she is passing, her answer is still yes! Back in medical school, you couldn't beat my wife at a test, she was straight A's, which is incredibly hard (not just for me, for anyone)...I shouldn't be surprised, but that's a killer test to slap down your first year without any training, quite an accomplishment.
A quick intro to medical school testing.
SAT/ACT = College Entrance Exams
MCAT = Medical School Entrance Exam - taken 3rd year of college
USMLE Boards Step 1, Step 2, and Step 3 = M.D. Exam - 4 separate tests taken throughout medical school and 1 year after medical school, a total of ~24 hours of testing.
Specialty Boards = Certifies you as capable to care for patients in a particular specialty (ie.Pediatrics)
The specialty boards costs between 1-2 grand depending on the specialty and last 8 hours. If you fail you don't get your money back and they are VERY hard, so residencies across the nation (whether it be surgery or pediatrics) have each class of interns take an in-training exam, that scores you against all other peers in the nation and tells you your chances of passing the real exam at the end of 3 years. My chances for passing the real test, according to my scores on the last test, are about 95%. My wife's chances are likely somewhere around 100%, if she has passed it all three years without any studying.
Just between you and me, I don't know what my wife sees in those whining adult patients, the kids of this world are missing out on a phenomenal doctor. :)
Newbie Doc
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