Introduction and OCS Study Tips

Meet Dr. David Smelser, PT, DPT, OCS and Dr. Austin Kercheville, PT, DPT, OCS—two very busy Board-Certified Specialists in Orthopaedic Physical Therapy. We're here to help you pass the OCS on a tight schedule like we did. In this episode, we introduce ourselves and give you a few tips to get you started with your study plan.

Transcript

Welcome to OCS Field Guide. The podcast that helps you study smarter for the OCS exam. 

If you’ve found this podcast, you’ve either decided or are thinking about taking the OCS exam. Taking the OCS is an ambitious—an expensive—task. And if you’re like us, you’re a full time clinician, and you’re trying to figure out how to study in the most efficient way possible to pass the exam. That’s why we’ve created this podcast. 

But before we get into the podcast, a little about us:

I’m David, and I’m a physical therapist at a private outpatient orthopedic practice in Atlanta, Georgia. I’m also a member of Georgia State University’s physical therapy faculty, and I’ve also been teaching online courses for a small undergraduate college since 2016. I passed my OCS exam in March 2020, but I spent the 6 months prior working three jobs and serving as a CI to two PT students. So I wanted to use my background in online education to create an effective, efficient tool for people who, like me, have limited time to sit down and study.

And I’m Austin. I work full time in outpatient orthopedic clinic in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and I actually ended up signing up for the exam shortly before finding out that my wife was expecting our first child. So I ended up I having to balance a full time caseload and caring for a newborn all while trying to study for the OCS exam. I say all that to say I know how important it is not to waste your valuable time.

But as we studied for the exam, we found that a lot of resources did just that: wasted valuable time on minutiae or on stories from clinical experience that were unrelated to exam material. So we decided to make a resource based on the premise of a field guide: a resource comprehensive in its scope and in its effort to prepare you for what you’re about to face, but one that doesn’t waste your time. So we created this podcast, drawing on our experience in online teaching and on studying with a tight schedule, to create the most effective and efficient OCS prep podcast possible.

So to keep our promise of not wasting your time, we want to launch this podcast with a few tips for studying for the OCS.

Tip one: prioritize the material. As you probably know, the board tells you what percentage of the exam is focused on each body region. The lumbar spine is 20% of the exam, the shoulder is 15%, the cervical spine is 13%, and the thigh/knee are 12%. These are the largest sections, and combined, the lumbar spine, cervical spine, shoulder, and knee cover 60% of the exam material. Now a passing score on the exam varies a little from year to year, but last year it was about 70%. So if you are tight on time, make sure you really know the material from these areas, since 60% gets you almost to a passing score already. And then spend less time on, say, the wrist and hand, which covers only 4% of the exam, or the elbow, which covers just another 4%. 

Number two: find as many high-quality practice questions as you can.  A huge part of exam success is just building your exam taking skills with the appropriate format. The OCS exam is almost entirely case-based. So nearly every question reads like the full subjective and objective sections from a note from your old CI that was a chronic over-documenter, and then the actual question may only relate to only one small part of the several paragraphs you just read. This makes test taking fatigue a real factor. We also found that a lot of the practice questions from other sources focused on minutiae in a way that the exam really doesn’t. For example, you are unlikely to get a question that asks you specifically what Altman’s criteria for hip OA is. But you are very likely to get a case that describes hip OA—that may fit Altman’s criteria—and then the actual question will be to identify the condition, or maybe select the best treatment, or maybe decide on an appropriate plan of care for the patient. So to that end, we are going to be sending out high quality practice questions to help you get used to the format and feel of the OCS exam. We plan to provide the most realistic OCS practice questions available, and you can sign up to receive them at our website, PhysioField Guide.com. 

Tip number three: focus on just a few good resources. Now we have nothing against residency programs, but Austin and I were both able to pass the exam by a wide margin without the help of a residence, just by building our own study structure. We both used a variety of resources to prepare for the exam. Including a weekend course, an online prep course, a different podcast, the Current Concepts monographs, and the Clinical Practice Guideliness. It would be easy to get distracted by the many available resources and get overwhelmed; but instead, pick a few to focus on. (And we highly recommend the Current Concepts be included in those few resources.) We think this podcast will be a great companion to the Clinical Practice Guidelines and Current Concepts to reinforce that material while you are commuting or doing yard work or otherwise unable or unwilling to sit at a desk and trudge through manuscripts.  

Number four: follow important journals on social media. So the exam could—theoretically—cover material from any article published in any journal at any time from anywhere in the world. And this is daunting. But in reality, the exam is most likely to cover material from the most important articles in the journals most closely related to the orthopedic section of the APTA. So how do you know which articles are most likely to show up? The JOSPT and other journals have actually been increasing their social media presence lately, which sometimes includes sharing articles that have been published in recent years that made a big splash or were otherwise seen as very important. So this is an easy way to get a feel for what material outside of the CPGs might be relevant for the exam. And here’s a bonus: we plan to cover some of those very important articles in this podcast in case you don’t have the time or energy to stay on top of them. 

Finally, tip five. Since you are probably working full time while studying for this exam, find ways to incorporate the study material into your work day. For example, take a week where you look through all your hip OA patients and apply the Current Concepts and the Clinical Practice Guidelines to each patient. Or print out a copy of Alrwaily’s low back pain Treatment Based Classification, and apply that to each low back pain patient who walks through the door. This will help you retain what you are studying more effectively, and—best of all—it should make you a better clinician. And that’s really the value of studying for this exam.

That wraps up our first episode. We hope you will subscribe to this podcast, and we encourage you to sign up for practice questions at PhysioFieldGuide.com. We have big plans to help you study smarter for the OCS exam, and we hope that you will join us.