As genetic counselors and ABGC board exam candidates, you all have extensive test taking experience. Exams in your undergraduate and graduate level courses have likely prepared you well for boards, and yet for some test takers, this test feels different. The amount of content on the ABGC exam can be overwhelming and make it hard to know where to start studying. While familiarizing yourself with the exam content is important, learning how to take a test is also a skill you can improve. Below are four tips for honing your test taking abilities and strategies.
1. Understand how questions are phrased and practice the most common boards-style questions.
The language of boards questions is chosen specifically to evaluate particular skills or content knowledge. Recognizing patterns in the word choice and construction of these questions can help you apply the material you studied more effectively in the exam context. For instance, while many student or community-made practice questions focus on ruling out the incorrect answer option, this is unlikely to be a style of question on the actual ABGC exam. Although practicing process of elimination can be a useful strategy for narrowing down your choices, you may dedicate more study time to questions that have you select the best or most appropriate answer because these are the types of questions you are more likely to come across on test day. Seeing information in a format you recognize can help you feel more confident when you encounter both familiar and unfamiliar topics on the board exam.
2. Get comfortable with selecting the “most correct” answer choice.
While practicing questions with the best answer choice format, reflect on the reasons each option would be considered correct or incorrect. The “best” choice among a given set of options is often not a perfect one, especially within the psychosocial realm. When my study strategy concentrated on content knowledge alone, I found that when I encountered these kinds of questions, I doubted my understanding of the material. After engaging critically with the reasoning underlying each option, I realized that a goal of these questions was encouraging test takers to identify an appropriate response among those available, even if there might be a hypothetical better response.
3. Make pro/con lists or draw out decision trees for application-based questions.
Many boards questions have test takers consider the next best step in a sequence of events. Being aware of this emphasis on clinical judgment and decision-making impacted how I studied the content domains. Instead of focusing on strictly recall-based facts about testing methodologies, I reviewed various clinical scenarios that examined the utility of different platforms. For instance, NGS-based panels cannot detect repeat expansion disorders and thus may have limitations for neuromuscular/movement disorders. Therefore, an appropriate second-tier test in the case of a negative neuromuscular panel might be PCR-based or a Southern blot. Practicing these applications was more helpful to me than memorizing the precise steps involved in NGS sequencing. Using visual depictions of each step in a process, such as a flow chart, decision tree, or pro/con list, helped me understand the connections between different clinical scenarios and contingencies.
4. Practice picking out the most relevant information within a question.
One of the most stressful experiences on exam day is feeling overwhelmed with the amount of information in the 150 questions. Reading comprehension and quickly identifying relevant information within a question are key parts of a successful test taking strategy, and they are skills you can practice ahead of the exam.
During practice tests, review what each question was trying to test you on when going back and checking your answers. For strictly memorization-based questions, ask why a particular statistic or detail would be significant enough for the exam writers to pick out? For example, a question asking about the de novo rate of 22q11.2 deletion syndrome would be important for a genetic counselor to know because it could impact conversations about family planning or reproductive decision making. Recurrence risk of other conditions with other high de novo rates would be good to memorize for a similar reason. If it was an application-based question, under which content domain or domains did it fall? What connections did the question want the reader to make between different concepts? This exercise can profoundly influence your confidence and competence when taking the test.
With so much on your plate, it can be difficult to know when and how to incorporate test taking strategies into your study plan. My hope is that by applying these four tips, studying for the ABGC exam will seem more manageable, and on test day, you will feel prepared for the types of questions you will encounter!
Header photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash