Everyone will tell you that this is a 1000 hour exam. Which is not the most useful advice. This exam is a very broad exam focused on a lot of moderately complicated concepts hidden in a morass of textbooks. A common behaviour in our cohort is to spend a ridiculous amount of time digging into the minute details regarding the mechanism of something of minimal examinable value such as the Anrep effect. This is very enjoyable, and beats memorising the components of a forest plot, but it is not smart studying.
Unfortunately, this exam is not about those fine details and elegant ideas, this is about short 10 minute broad snap shots. It is much smarter to dedicate yourself to the syllabus in the format that the sage heads in the college wanted you to.
The Planner:
Click here to Open Updated Exam Planner
This has the whole syllabus set out by subtopic and level of detail requested. Here’s how to use it:
- Click on the first sheet labelled Planner.
- Put in the date you plan to sit (and the next two sittings as well). There is also a space for the dates of any courses that you are planning to attend.
- Add in the number of hours you want to dedicate to each of the three levels of knowledge for example:
- 5 hours for a level 1 topic
- 3 hours for a level 2 topic
- There are no level 3 topics anymore!
- Save your sheet to dropbox or google drive so you can get to it if you get study done somewhere else.
- You should get a calculation of the total number of past exam questions, the total number of individual syllabus points, and the time required to complete the study by the dates selected.
- If you flick over to the tab labelled time sheet, you should see the whole of the syllabus as at 2019 broken down into its sub sections.
- The second last column is where you annotate the file as you study. All the other calculations will adjust accordingly.
The sheet will automatically calculate how many hours you need to do each day/week. As you fill it out it will tell you when you are likely to complete your syllabus review at your current rate.
With the settings above, you are saying that you can cover a topic like:
“Describe the normal and abnormal processes of cardiac excitation and electrical activity”
in just 5 hours. If you think you can do this, then you are up for a total of 929 hours which is close enough to 1000 hours except…. you ignore the pharmacology. Of course you can’t do this so, to cover physiology in about 600 hours you need to dedicate time as (3, 2, 1) for (L1, L2, L3). This leaves you about 400 hours for pharmacology. Not impossible, but it’s time to stop reading about it and get started.
This is just designed to keep you on track and motivated, because… who doesn’t love ticking off a check box.
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