The Three Critical Pearls to Study for the PANCE

There are three pearls to increase your effectiveness in PANCE review. I get to see the trends of those that fail their boards. The main problem is ineffective PANCE review. Period. Here are the three pearls to increase effectiveness.

1. Embrace The SUCK.

We equate time studying with how much we are learning. But that’s not the case.

If you’re at the gym, and start to work out with 20-pound weights. After even a few reps the pain builds up, and you feel the burn, and so eventually you swap them for 10-pound weights.

Suddenly, the workout is easier. You can do more reps. You feel instantly stronger. The problem, of course, is that while the lighter weights make you feel better about your performance, the heavier ones were providing a better workout.

If you are reading, but not working on recall, you are lifting 10-pound weights. If you are spending a significant amount of time doing test questions, you are not lifting weights at all. That’s like standing on a treadmill with roller blades on.

Effective learning feels difficult. It’s this ability to embrace the suck that separates ultra-high-achievers from everyone else.

Learning is many things – challenging, eye-opening, exhilarating, motivating and tiresome. It should never be a cakewalk. If you are having too easy a time, you’re doing it wrong.

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2. Stop Cramming! This Isn’t High School Bio!

A favorite study-technique of college students everywhere, cramming – or the last-ditch effort to memorize as much information in a condensed time frame – is effective if you want to remember something in the very short term.

To acquire deep-seated medical knowledge, it’s crucial that you space out your learning. Interestingly, it’s the act of forgetting that makes multiple, spaced out study sessions more effective at forming long-term memories than a single marathon session.

The act of forgetting information and then re-learning it, ideally multiple times, is what cements memories in the brain. The process of forgetting, and then repeatedly filling in those memory gaps, makes them stick.

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3. Make Connections “Sticky”

The more connections you make to information, the better.

Pause frequently and think about what you’re reading and how it relates to what you read earlier. Constantly asking, “how could they ask this question on the boards?” But don’t stop there. If you really want the material to stick, make personal connections as well: relate the text to events that have happened in your own life, or the life of a friend or acquaintance. Make it crazy. Naughty. Funny. Make it memorable. That’s what we do at our live conferences that gets people to respond like these testimonials.

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The more individual threads you can tie from the material in the book to other, independent realms of pre-existing knowledge, the more likely it is to be sticky. Effective PANCE Review is key.