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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2192 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 15, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This is probably my last opportunity to waste time complaining about the upcoming exam, and the study material for it in particular.

The second last mock (150 questions, 3 hour timer) I did? Oh fucking hell man. I don't deserve this. Let me illustrate.

[RCT trial findings for agomelatine vs placebo, including a forest plot]

My answer was marked wrong, despite the fact that I was extremely confident in it. I was nonplussed by the claimed "correct" answer. I took it to ChatGPT with a screenshot.

How am I reasonably expected to tackle this one?

You are not reasonably expected to get this from the marked answer, because the marked answer is almost certainly wrong.

Exhibit 2:

A survival chart/graph comparing different doses of disulfiram vs placebo against cumulative probability of remaining abstinent from alcohol.

(It didn't look good for the disulfiram)

My answer was marked incorrect. Why?

They refer to information provided in the text to support their answer. What fucking text???

Yeah, that line is bad. In the screenshot, there is no supporting text except the graph and the answer options.

Final exhibit:

Some bullshit summary of qualitative research on the challenges of handling dementia patients overnight at a care home.

Where can I get myself some risperidone? Unrelated, what about this one?

(The request for an antipsychotic wasn't unrelated, dear reader)

Risperidone: from a lawful prescriber, ideally not as prophylaxis against SPMM-induced psychosis. On the actual question: your answer is very defensible. The stem literally begins:

“To explore the current practices and challenges in night-time care for people with dementia living in care homes…” Your selected answer: “To clarify the challenges that exist for night-time care of people with dementia living in care homes” is basically a paraphrase of that.

I started losing it.

Right. This mock has left me mildly homicidal. To amuse me, please evaluate what proportion of the questions I've shared for review are sane, dubious, or written by someone who should be an in-patient in a psych ward.

Sane /exam-legitimate: 7 questions Dubious/badly-worded: 5 Containment level broken: 4

So the mock’s sanity index is about: 44% sane, 31% dodgy, 25% cursed.

What do I even say? What do I even do? ChatGPT gently dissuaded me from actually killing anyone, and even filing a GDPR request so I could track down whoever wrote this paper and egg their house. All I can do is come here and vent about it.

Bonus question, copied verbatim:

Mrs. Patterson is a 66-year-old woman who has presented with evidence of dementia. She has a personal history of severe migraine and a strong family history of stroke and early onset dementia. Which of the following is the most likely diagnosis? Mrs. Patterson is a 66-year-old woman who has presented with evidence of dementia. She has a personal history of severe migraine and a strong family history of stroke and early onset dementia. Which of the following is the most likely diagnosis? Mrs. Patterson is a 66-year-old woman who has presented with evidence of dementia. She has a personal history of severe migraine and a strong family history of stroke and early onset dementia. Which of the following is the most likely diagnosis?

Unfortunately, diagnosing the exam writer with dementia was not included in the list of options. Shame.

Anyway. Enough kvetching. Back on the grind. An estimated 75% chance of passing, which I'm going to take with gratitude.

Who is writing these questions and who is grading the responses? I can't speak to this particular exam, but when you take the bar you have to buy an expensive prep course run by a private company and the practice exams are graded by people who work for the company, who aren't the same as the people who will be grading the actual test. Assuming your situation is similar, it wouldn't surprise me if the mocks are being graded by non-practicing doctors who may not be doing the best job, especially, if like me, you went with a less expensive option than the industry standard. That being said, I never got any obviously bad feedback. I'd only be worried if the guy who graded your practice test is representative of who grades the real one.

British psychiatry trainees like me almost universally rely on a paid resource and question bank called SPMM for our written exams. It's very expensive for the entry level package, doubly so if you want their paid mocks, triply if you want a statistics crash course.

Why? Because the nominal syllabus is... everything. Or at least so large that it's completely impractical for even the best trainee to read the official reading list/syllabus and then understand whats relevant to the test. We have to rely on SPMM (or lesser known alternatives) to make things manageable.

You would think that the dedicated teaching we get during our training itself, or the Royal College's free online material would help right? Oh no, that's unwarranted optimism. Like it or not, you need SPMM.

Who is writing these questions and who is grading the responses?

SPMM claims to have unusual, perhaps questionably legal levels of insight into the actual questions that come on the exam (they probably ask the people who just gave it to jot down as much as they can from memory). That's alongside their doctors hand-crafting what they imagine are representative questions to pad things out. What kind of doctors? From what I can tell, ones just a few years senior to me. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, since they would have given the same exams recently.

I presume the same people choose the correct answer for the questions they wrote, and then the answer stem too. But once that's set in stone, the grading is automated. I can't even flag things to the attention of a human within the company. They don't care.

Assuming your situation is similar, it wouldn't surprise me if the mocks are being graded by non-practicing doctors who may not be doing the best job, especially, if like me, you went with a less expensive option than the industry standard.

Are they non-practicing? I hope not. They're probably just cash-strapped and asked to shit out a ton of output for not very much money. QC seems inadequate. Even their teaching material is riddled with errors. And this is the best money can buy!

I passed my earlier exam with a different version of the paid material, and I can tell you that the overall quality of things was grossly superior. This time, they're borderline scamming me. By the time I realized, it's too late to simply give up and read the primary sources, or even to switch to a competitor. Literally every other resident I know is in the same boat, and it's rapidly sinking.

The good news is that the actual exam, or at least the last one I gave, was mostly sane. Mostly. There was a question about the mechanism of action of a new antidepressant, where the real answer was "nobody knows", but I had to choose something else anyway. Praying that's the case here, but bad study material and bad mocks are driving me nuts.

I was gonna say that getting GPT to polish your affirm your intuitions wasn’t good evidence, but I read the sample question and now I smell burnt toast.

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