General Advice

General advice for studying

While everyone has their own methods for revising, a few suggestions are useful which aim to maximise your chances of passing first time (or on subsequent times!) We hope these tips are useful as you are about to sit the exam; and before you start planning your revision.

1. Attached is an article (probably the best guideline there is) about sleep! It is the best advice that we could offer in the entirety of the revision website - and will help greatly with memory retention!
2. Try to form a study group, which forces you to cover topics at pace and teach others so you consolidate your learning.
3. Please weight your study towards the non-malignant aspects of haematology - and spend no more than a couple of weeks on malignant haematology. The exam is heavily biased in favour of laboratory problems compared with Part 1 which was more equally weighted in all areas.
4. Give yourself 4-6 months preparation time - start with morphology and other lab principles which require practice so that you have plenty of time to grasp the concepts; review guidelines and things which require rote learning (e.g. immunophenotyping) nearer the exam.
5. Don't expect to be able to cover everything - and if you do, you may have forgotten what you revised at the start.
6. Make a note of exam topics that haven't been covered as extensively or recently as they may come up in the next diet
7. Ensure you have consultants to regularly review morphology with you; and have a few tutorials with a clotting consultant to go through more tricky questions that might arise in the coagulation paper.
8. For morphology, your fellow SpRs or consultants will have slide collections. Borrow these and study together to go through 15-25 slides at a time. NEQAS collections are especially good if your local hospital has kept these.
9. Practice viva questions and formulate some for each other! The examiners can be very demanding and you need to train yourself to think quickly and answer confidently. There will be some viva questions here on the website for you to practice.
10. Do attend the RCPath transfusion revision course organised by NHSBT. These are free to trainees. It will be important for you to identify concepts that you struggle with before you go as it won't completely cover transfusion in a week.

General advice for the examination

1. You've done as much as you can by the time you arrive at the examination centre. Try to enjoy the time that you are there and don't do any more revision - as tempting as it may be!
2. Confidence in the whole exam is the key - if you have put the work in - then it will be nerves on the day that might cause you to pass or fail.
3. Failure in the morphology questions (especially short answers) is often because candidates run out of time and leave entire questions unanswered - make sure you allocate equal amounts of time for each question to gain as many marks as possible. Most people will find that there is not enough time for each paper overall.
4. Go into the viva with the mindset that you are the consultant haematologist - remember that this is the exit exam.
5. It's difficult to gauge how well you have done so don't think too much about it until the results come out!

Supplementary questions were used in the past (where you wrote the answers to the first part of the question then hand the answer in, before getting a second part), but are now no longer in use. Nevertheless if you are given the diagnosis then please ensure that you consider all the differentials if that are asked of you in the question.