Content area
Full Text
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) Fellowship examination is a route to vocational registration as a general practitioner in Australia.
The examination is in three sections:
* an applied clinical knowledge test (AKT) using single best answer and extended matching questions
* a key feature problems (KFP) section that tests clinical decision making using short case scenarios requiring written responses and best response selection, and
* an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE).1
The KFP question style is rarely used in medical assessments and is unfamiliar to most Fellowship candidates. The pass rate for the Fellowship examination has fallen in recent years. International medical graduates who are eligible to sit the examination through experience in general practice have the lowest pass rate.2
Candidates enrolled in the Fellowship examination can access a mock examination through gp/eaming, the RACGP web based learning platform. Each candidate can take the mock examination twice. After the first attempt, the candidate's score is given for each International Classification of Primary Care code. Candidates can access a set of referenced model answers after the second attempt, and medical educators provide individual feedback on performance.
The following 10 tips are based on the experience of marking the examination support online program.
1. Answer the question
This applies to all examinations. Examiners can only give marks if your response answers the question. Writing irrelevant information wastes precious time. Patients want doctors who answer their concerns, not doctors who spout what they know but who offer irrelevant information.
If you don't know the answer, move on to the next question. If you have time at the end, have an educated guess.
Examples
* If you are asked to write about management, you will not get marks for writing down further history questions or describing what you would look for on examination.
* If the question asks for common problems, you will not get marks for mentioning rare but important conditions. For example, acoustic neuroma is an important condition but it is not common. Conversely if the question asks for the most important conditions, acoustic neuroma might be included.
* If you are asked for four investigations, list four investigations. You will lose marks if you list more answers than were requested.
2. Be specific