PERPARING FOR THE FINAL EXAM IN MEDICAL MICROBIOLOGY
The Final exam for the Medical Microbiology course will be a National Board Examination; this
exam covers all the material presented in this course and will contribute 40% of your final grade.
In preparing for this exam, it is important to review your core notes, lecture notes, handouts
and assigned reading from the course. Students have also found it very helpful to use any of several
national-board-style review publications available in the campus bookstore, which constitute compact
and readable review and study guides.
Despite the pressures of other ongoing courses, it is important to properly prepare for this final.
Studying in a small group with two or three classmates (rather than doing all you studying alone)
is always extremely helpful, and particularly so for such reviews.
We have generally found our students to be well-prepared for the National Board Examination,
but there are at least two features of this exam which make it different from our in-house exams, and
these are important to keep in mind.
1. Since we do not make up this exam (it is provided and scored by the National Board of
Medical Examiners) there will certainly be material tested in some questions which has
not be covered in the course. Be prepared for some questions on completely
unfamiliar material, and do not let it distract you or slow you down. (Note also that
while the NBME exam includes both Microbiology and Immunology, the immunology
questions are in a separate section at the end of the exam which you will be instructed to
ignore).
2. Unlike most of our exams, there is substantial time pressure on the National Boards.
There will be 125 questions to be answered in two and a half hours, providing a little over
one minute per question. Don’t spend time trying to figure out answers to difficult
questions until you have gone through the entire exam and answered all those questions
you can deal with more easily. Time your progress through the exam and make certain
you leave no question unanswered; since there is no deduction for wrong answers.
The format of the questions will be generally similar to those you have seen on our in-house
exams, although some questions will have more than five alternative answers to choose from.
Overall, the coverage of material in our course reflects fairly well the importance given to that
material on the NBME exam, with a particularly strong emphasis on clinical bacteriology.
This NBME exam will also be more difficult than ours, and the raw class mean is likely to be
about ten points lower. Before being combined with the three Midterms to generate your overall
course scores, the scores on the National Board final will be scaled to a mean close to that of our inhouse exams. A minimum overall score of 65% is required to earn a passing grade.
BE ON TIME FOR THIS EXAM; WE ARE NOT PERMITTED TO SEAT LATE COMERS.
Remember to bring a #2 pencil
Ming Tan
.