At 7:43 on a Tuesday morning in a Chicago convention center, 300 physicians sit in absolute silence. They are not performing surgery. They are not calculating drug doses for a crashing patient. They are staring at a computer screen, waiting for the word Begin .
“The hardest part isn’t the knowledge,” says Dr. Maya Hersh, a third-year resident at a major academic center in Boston, six weeks before her exam. “It’s the format . In real life, if a patient’s blood pressure drops, you have vitals, a history, a physical exam, a nurse telling you what just happened. On the exam, you get a one-sentence stem: ‘A 45-year-old with a history of GERD and obesity is undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Five minutes after insufflation, SpO2 drops to 82%. What do you do?’ ” anesthesiology examination
But the real work is psychological. To pass the ABA Applied Exam, you must learn to talk while thinking. You must narrate your crisis management out loud, as if the examiners are invisible cameras recording your every hesitation. The exam itself is a masterpiece of sadistic design. It is divided into two parts, taken over two separate days, often months apart. At 7:43 on a Tuesday morning in a
This is the —commonly known as the OSCE and SOE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination and Standardized Oral Examination). But to the people sitting in those chairs, it has another name: The Reckoning . They are staring at a computer screen, waiting
“You cannot intubate. You cannot ventilate. Heart rate is dropping.”