Year 3 - Surgery

Creating a test

Under "Shelf Subjects," select "Surgery"

For additional questions, some redditors have mentioned including "Emergency Medicine" as well, but not generally recommended.

Under "Systems," select all to get a mixed bag of surgery goodies.

Medical Study Zone

Use as a supplement for weaker subjects since it tends to be more detailed overall.

Medical Study Zone

Good as a high level overview, but since the videos are a bit older, may not be up to date.

Divine Intervention

Most recommended podcast to listen to while on the road or doing chores! Below are the links to the podcast categories, a spreadsheet that has the topics characterized, and crowd-sourced episode notes.

Dr. Pestana's Surgery Notes (in podcast form!)

If you rather listen than read the book, check this out!

Emma Holliday

A bit outdated, but still recommended as a nice overview.

Nailed It: The Orthopedic Surgery Podcast

Good podcast specifically for those ortho rotations!

Dr. Pestana’s Surgery Notes

Highly recommended as a quick reference:

Surgery Youtube Video

Dr. HY Notes

These notes were derived from the video transcripts using AWS Transcribe Medical, summarized into bullet points using the OpenAI GPT-3.5 Turbo model, and reviewed and edited for accuracy by students.

Editors

Spencer Morton

Medical Study Zone

Usually do one around halfway through your rotation, then do 2-3 more in the week leading up to your shelf exam.

Laboratory Values

You can print this out or open in a separate tab to reference.

Maybe you'll find this helpful?

Here is a grading tool I made on Excel that will help with keeping track of your answers and then semi-automically score it. Follow the steps below and make sure to click "Enable Edit" at the top of the excel sheet.

1) On the bottom of the sheet, ensure that you’re on the correct tab for the form you’re currently taking.

2) Input your answers as you go along, starting at Box A1, and moving down the column.

3) Once you’re done, on the bottom of the sheet click on the appropriate form’s Answer tab, highlighting and copying the correct answers.

4) Return back to the original form with your inputted answers then paste the correct answers starting at Box B1.

5) The excel sheet should then automatically grade that form and your % correct will be found on the bottom of the answers columns.

NOTE: this % correct may be slightly different from the "Equated Percent Correct" (EPC) score that the official NBME form gives you, as NBME compares your score with other students and how they did on each questions. Just be aware that your raw % score may be +/- 3% of the EPC.

Tables to potentially correlate your scores to a percentile.

This table can give some insights on what your score means in terms of a percentile:

NBME will give you a report with the "Equated Percent Correct" (EPC) score. With this score, go to the respective shelf and match it with the first column. Your percentile will consequently be on the second column.

For example, let's say for a family med form, your EPC was 60. Looking at table 7A, your percentile would be approximately 6th percentile.

However, schools seem to grade slighly differently. Here's more grading tables, as well a calculation on how they ended up grading what the NBME sends them:

In this school's case, a EPC of 61 for family med would be equivalent to 5th percentile.

TLDR; I thought shelves would be standardized amongst schools, but even now there seems to be some discrepancies. Stay informed and determine what your school's cut-offs are for passing, but these tables can help you figure out if you're on the right path.