Discover Pearls of Wisdom to Prepare for the Pathology Board Exam

Kendall S. Brewer, MD, breathed a sigh of relief in July after finding out that she passed her pathology board exam. Now a cytopathology fellow in the Department of Pathology, at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, she offers a few tips for pathology residents who are preparing for their board exam. 

Her advice: Start early, get a study schedule together, study when you are not rushed and pick a study resource that works best for you. There are many resources geared toward individual learning styles, depending on if you are a visual learner, an auditory learner or follow another style.

“There are also several good books to study, depending on if you are a person who likes to read or use bullet points,” says Dr. Brewer, who will complete her term on the ASCP Resident Council this fall. “I used the ASCP Quick Compendium for Clinical Pathology. That was fabulous. There is another book by ASCP, Practical Surgical Pathology, Second Edition, that I used a lot.”

She also made flash cards, got together with a study group and used ASCP’s Resident Question Bank (RQB). “It is a good study tool,” she notes. “It’s a bank where you won’t get 100 percent on it, and then you figure out why you got certain questions wrong.”

Additionally, the ASCP Resident Review Series, presented each year at the ASCP Annual Meeting, offers a good overview.

The upshot, she says: “Go in prepared knowing this will be a test you’ll walk out feeling awful about. You won’t get 100 percent. Go in with expectations that you’ll struggle with it, but most do fine. We are all in this together.”

To find out more about the resources that are available to residents, click here.