I Failed My PANCE, What Now?
So here is another email that I get all too frequently. I took my PANCE and I failed, what do I do now? Sometimes it’s simple. Take a PANCE Review Course, study up on your weak areas, you have already seen the exam and it hopefully is not as intimidating the second time around.
Now what if you already took a PANCE Review Course, thought you were prepared, and you were completely blindsided by failing the PANCE? Well here are my suggestions to students who have failed the PANCE and want help.
I have attached the test scores of someone who reached out to me after failing (these results were from the PANRE but the idea still works). If you look at the score, this individual was really really close and failed by 4 points. Now if you are in a similar situation, this is actually a pretty easy fix.
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Look at the test results here; the content blueprint shows the % of the organ systems, the % correct and your decile (the lower the better). So my immediate recommendation here is simple… focus on cardio (even if you just come up 5% from the 74%, cardio is 16% of the boards so it’s a big part), pulmonary (a lot of room to go up here from 59% and again it’s a heavy hitter at 12%) and GI (again, as repetitive as I may sound a lot of room to go up from 63% and its another heavy hitter).
Side note, and something students will eventually have to deal with depending on what specialty you go into, can you guess this particular persons area of expertise? If you guessed Ortho, you were right! This is the problem that we run into with people trying to recertify with the PANRE, if you’ve been in a specialty for years and now have to take a general exam, it’s not always easy.
So hopefully you are well prepared, have taken a PANCE Review Course and know each organ system enough to pass the PANCE. However in the unfortunate case that you do fail, look towards these blogs as a guide, it is as important to have a plan on how to study as it is to know the material. Study smart, study hard.
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