How to Study

How To Study

How should someone study for an exam like this?

First please read this two page excerpt from the book Range by David Epstein.

It turns out that mixed practice, i.e. doing a viva on COPD and then one on aciclovir and then one on the knee ligaments is apparently better than doing multiple COPD vivas in a row.

So if interleaving is better, why have a website that is designed for and allows ‘blocked’ type study?

  1. This website is generally used as a reference by educators and not solely for rote-learning and repetitive cramming.
  2. There is a wide curriculum for this exam and type A personality people studying for it who want to know they have exhausted all the known angles for approaching a subject. This site organises an otherwise chaotic collection of resources.
  3. This website being for free strongly discourages people with commercial interests trying to profit off this exam who would provide proprietary content in a similar way.
  4. People have traditionally studied by topic and prior to this site would often print out hundreds of pages of vivas which was a waste of time and paper. People will presumably keep studying by topic regardless of the science on learning, as the concept of interleaving is not well known to medical education.
  5. Not everyone works better with interleaving. Blocked practice still has some utility, probably for most people, even if in general is worse than mixed practice.

In summary, EDvivas.com provides people with a useful resource which people can use however they feel is most effective. After getting a feel for the topics and the many ways a viva can approach them, exam candidates are strongly encouraged to do mixed ‘interleaved’ practice, potentially using the original exams from the ACEM website. Such practice feels worse but when it comes to learning, making it hard actually makes for better learning and potentially better results on exam day.

This is a general principle for your future education. Sometimes expedience and efficiency of learning makes faster short term gains but is worse in the longer term.

Please feel free to feedback your experiences via the email address on the home page.