The extraordinary volume of information and the high-stakes nature of the board exams has led to an entire industry of test-preparation tools. While there are a few different types of study tools marketed towards medical schools, the biggest ones are question banks (QBanks). Selection and use of QBanks is one of the most prominent features of any board exam prep. These tools – UWorld, Amboss, or TrueLearn – to name a few, leverage the use of retrieval and spaced practice to improve understanding and retention of material. In preparation for board exams, students frequently exhaust these QBanks, which have thousands of questions in them. Something that surprised me as I started my role as a MELS, was how ubiquitous these QBanks are and how students were already very familiar with the concept of retrieval practice (I recently wrote about this with some other cognitive psychologist MELS!).
As I mentioned above, I work primarily in undergraduate medical education. As a PhD, this was initially confusing for me. I completed my undergraduate training at university alongside pre-med students. I then went on to graduate school at the same time that some of my classmates went on to medical school. In medical education, undergraduate medical education, or UME, is distinguished from graduate medical education (GME). UME refers to schooling prior to obtaining an M.D. or O.D., and GME refers to training as a resident within a specialty. Thus, medical students complete general undergraduate education then go into medical school where they complete undergraduate medical education.
Within UME, medical students must take and pass the first 2 out of 3 board exams to be able to practice as a licensed doctor. Once in a specialty specific residency program (e.g., family medicine, general surgery, pediatrics, etc.) they are expected to take the third exam to be fully licensed as a general practitioner. At this GME level they are also in training to take their specialty-specific board exam. Each specialty oversees and administers their own standards for within their discipline, and residents within GME must take and pass those exams as well.
Because of the ever-growing body of medical knowledge, and fast-evolving best-practices, all practicing physicians must maintain active certification within their specialty. This phase of medical education is called Continuing Medical Education (CME). All physicians must continue with CME throughout their career in order to remain certified within their specialty. While the nature and pace of these exams is very different from UME (medical students take A LOT of exams), anyone going into medicine needs to be able to take and pass board exams as part of their professional skill set.
Given the constant need for learning new information and the expectation to demonstrate that knowledge on exams, a growing professional field within medical education is Medical Education Learning Specialists (MELS). MELS help learners (whether at the UME, GME, or CME level) to adjust their study strategies and test taking strategies in order to be as successful as possible. I view my job as helping learners to understand their learning in the context of whatever they are going through. Oftentimes, study strategies developed outside of the context of medical education are not successful within medical education. The high volume of content, high-stakes nature of the exams, and increasing and changing professional responsibilities make studying and passing exams markedly different within medication education compared to university, as well as different across UME, GME, and CME.
