Customer Reviews

Surgery PreTest™ Self-Assessment & Review, Twelfth Edition (PreTest Clinical Medicine)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Like a typical pretest book, this book is only questions, which do not comprehensively cover surgery. While some questions are good, expect a good number of the questions in this book to be completely unrelated and so random that they are not going to help you pass the surgery shelf examination. Unfortunately this can make some of the sections in this book very difficult. However, I think that it is fair to say that this is one of the few question books that you can buy for surgery. Apple and Lange puts out a surgical question book that tends to be a little more popular but is littered with errors on critical topics. At my school we even had the head of the surgical department denounce Apple and Lange for its grotesque flaws. Because the surgery shelf consists of mostly internal medicine questions relating to the management of a surgical patient, a good number of students thought it would be a good idea to use USMLE world or Kaplan question, both of which contain a separate section on surgery. Although these contain excellent question, they are very expensive to buy just for a clerkship and there are a very limited number of questions on surgery alone. What I am really trying to say is that unfortunately there isn't a good alternative to this book at this time. Other surgical question books remain just as erroneous or are littered with useless question. I feel confident saying that while this isn't the best book, it is one of the best options. Don't use it as a staple study source, but keep it handy to practice questions right before the shelf after you have finished studying other material.

I don't really understand other reviews that state the questions in this book are too hard. I recently took the shelf exam and would say the exam was just as hard if not harder since most of the questions were very detailed internal medicine questions. I felt it to be very helpful especially when used with another book as a reference for concepts I did not understand. Surgery shelf is very difficult and you need to do questions from somewhere. I also own Case Files and Surgery Recall. I used all three but found pretest prepared me most for the test. Case Files helped with my understanding but should be read at least twice. and Surgery recall is good for pimping and only pimping...not the actual exam.

I just took the surgery shelf today. This is not a bad question book. It's just that there are some really specific questions in here, likely due to the mandatory 500 questions for each PreTest book. But there is good stuff in here if you know which questions you can safely blow over. They need a new editor to fix the mistakes (saying the answer is A when the explanation indicates D is the answer; also, they need to get "increased" and "decreased" straight). They also need to redo the explanations to make the answer more obvious. But I really did learn a lot from the explanations. There are better sources out there to study from, though. Kaplan/Pestana notes are very high yield. The Surgery tests from the Kaplan Qbook are very good too. UsmleWorld is good, but focused on trauma more than my particular exam did. The best way to study for the clerkship exam is to work hard throughout the clerkship, and in the last week or two, do 1st) Kaplan/Pestana notes 2nd)Kaplan Qbook 3rd)any online question source you have. If you finish #3 or feel they are too easy, switch to this book.

This was used during my surgical clerkship to prepare for the shelf. I think it was a decent question book, though as others have noted there are some errors that the publishers shouldn't have missed as well as answers which do not match up to UWorld's clarity and depth. With a printed version, in the concise format that it is, I still don't regret the ability to review this prior to the shelf and found it helpful in my preparations.

I also used Surgical Recall as well as UWorld's surgical questions and Appleton and Lange's Question Bank. All in all, it was a complete source of quick study material; I would recommend this over Lange.

Surgery Pretest is low yield for surgery shelf exam. USMLE World has much better questions for the shelf. For the shelf, you have to know the diagnosis for a patient and the next reasonable step in work-up/treatment. USMLE World questions are like that, Pretest's aren't. Don't buy Pretest for the shelf exam.

I did almost every question in pretest, and the most relevant sections I did more than once. I think this is a good but not great set of questions, I definitely think it's a manageable number of questions and they talk about things that you never hear about while on rotation but come up on the written exam. Some things they go into a bit too much detail to be useful-- for instance there are probably like 10-15 Q's on malignant hypertension but I may have gotten one question on it if at all, and there's an entire section on transplant whereas there was maybe 1-2 questions on transplant on my shelf exam. This isn't to say that every shelf is distributed the same way, and I think it's better to over cover topics than under cover topics. Sometimes the language of the explanations can be a little dense and hard to understand, but it is a pretty thorough answer key that I essentially read almost all of. My friends and I did a lot of different things for the shelf, but pretest was something that was more commonly used by people who ultimately had success on the surgery shelf exam. The questions are really hard, but in order to prepare for a fairly difficult exam, that's what you want. Sometimes when I felt confused or lost by an explanation I would refer back to my reference texts for explanations (I used Surgical Recall and actually Step Up to Medicine for reference, NMS Casebook here and there) which only happened occasionally. Overall I do recommend this for the surgery shelf exam, I think Pestana Review is the go to in terms of reading for really excelling on the test but this is definitely a great set of questions to get through in preparation for the exam. I personally did do well on the surgery shelf and I would say that pretest was what I relied on the most. I think if I had spent more time with Pestana Review though I would have done even better.

covers most of the major topics asked on board exams. And explainations get to the point. Good book for review questions overall

These authors have no place in medicine, let alone medical education. The number of errors in this book reaches astronomical levels before even 1/5th of the way through the book. The errors I'm talking about aren't grammar errors either (I wish it was only grammar!), it's pure medical/physiologic errors. The sheer quantity of erroneous information constantly makes one second guess whether the incompetence of these authors has somehow worked its way into the NEXT question that you're currently reading. It's hard to learn from someone you know is a buffoon.

Furthermore, ALMOST ZERO questions are two step questions, which is what we'll be getting on the shelf exam. Most of the questions are simple single step questions, which is good for fact learning (assuming the facts are even correct!), but not efficient for shelf study.

That said, the spectrum of topics is broad, and there are precious few other good surgery question bank sources (there are really only about 400 good questions that I can think of from USMLE World Step 2 CK, and Blueprints Q&A surgery). So if you want more questions for simple knowledge bank practice, Pre-Test is about as bad as most other sources, and beggers can't be choosers.

My suggestion is to decide how many questions you want to do in preparation for the surgery shelf exam. If you want to do more than 400, then you can consider getting Pre-Test. If no, exhaust USMLE World first, then move onto Blueprints, and you'll be fine.

terrible book riddled with errors and obviously published with no quality control. questions are way too detailed, often with little relevance to the shelf test - which is the only reason someone would be reading this book in the first place.

These questions are really tough, but I'm sure it will help me on my in-service and NBME board exams.