Let’s talk about the 2024 Written Board Exam

I guess I wanted to make this post as a warning to future readers. Throughout my training, everywhere I turned and everyone I talked to said the WQE is the same as OKAPS. “Study the same way and you’ll be fine.” That was not my experience at all. I think the OKAPS focused on a lot of minutia, like specific gene mutations or random associations. The WQE focuses a lot more on management, like how would you manage this complication, or workup this weird presentation. A lot of the answers were for sure debatable, and often times you would pick both answers in the “real world.” I felt a little blindsided by the test itself, but still managed to pass. Despite knowing this now, I’m not sure how I would’ve studied differently. Don’t know if the questions are like this every year, or they decided to change up the qbank this year.

(For background information, I did ok on okaps (70,59,47 percentiles). Most of my studying was done through anki. Never opened bcsc. For pgy2/3 I used ophthoquestions, and for pgy4/WQE I used AAO qbank.)