The PassAMC Blog

College clinical examinations have a notorious reputation for being "random" and "not assessing things that matter". But why is this? 

Well, it comes down to what the "examiners" aka Colleges think is important vs what we think is important. We might feel that purely clinical medicine is...

Writing an exam question is a lot harder than it looks. They need to strike the right balance between not being too easy or too hard, and they also need to discriminate (aka be able to separate out candidates for the purposes of ranking). One of the techniques that MCQ writers sometimes use is...

Modern curricula have plenty of non-clinical aspects within them, as part of the broader professional remits of being a doctor working in Australia.

 There are lots of non-clinical domains, all ripe for testing. If you hadn’t known this, you may have not revised for this, and as...

The answer lies in an academic construct called the Angoff Method.

Put simply, from the moment your exam is set there are four key processes:

• The answer grid proposed by the authors of the exam is tweaked to make sure that it works in real life.
• The examiners then set a mark against any...

Now that we have convinced you (hopefully!) of the need to understand how to play the rules of the game, it Is worth knowing about how exams are set and written, because with a little consideration of the academics you can start to formulate what might and might not feature on an exam.

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The AMC recommends a variety of sources:

Devitt P, Barker J, Mitchell J and Hamilton-Craig C. Clinical Problems In General Medicine, 2nd edn. Churchill Livingstone, 2003, ISN 0443073236.

Edwards C and Bouchier IA (eds). Davidson’s Principles and Practice of Medicine, 18th edn....

According to the AMC, the exams will test a series of tasks:

There are lots of free recall papers available. However should you use them?

According to the AMC, the AMC has found the question stems and responses to be incorrect. Candidates who base their preparation on such reconstructed papers may have a distorted impression of the format...