The SJT

Hi,


Despite my new start on an obstetrics and gynaecology rotation this week, the most 'important' thing that happened was sitting the 'Situational Judgement Test' (SJT) - if you want to have a bash at it yourself click here for the official practice site. The SJT is a test which gives you multiple choice options for 'situations' you may find yourself in as a foundation doctor, meaning it is not really knowledge based. This is the first year it has been used properly, so we will see what happens, and it is a test that every final year medical student in the UK now has to sit. It is important, as the results are used to allocate where you work on graduating, and which jobs you get. Do well and you could be doing paediatric surgery in GOSH (if you want...), do badly and you could end up in the Shetney Islands working with incontinent sheep... Well, perhaps not, but you get the idea.

The main problem with this test is that, amongst my year at least, it is perceived as much more of a luck-based-exercise rather than something that requires any skill. One of my friends was telling me that during the pilot phase, two groups were set the SJT, one who had been coached to do well, and the other one hadn't. No difference was seen between the two groups, suggesting that you couldn't practice for it. I don't really like this, as surely you should be able to practice for pretty much anything, from hard maths to soft 'communication skills' - they should all be something that you can practice and get better at. If practising the SJT questions doesn't make any statistical difference, then to me this suggests that the test is far more luck based than anything. After all, you could coach me for a year, but I wouldn't be able to get a (fair) dice to roll any more sixes than you could... 

As you can imagine, the feeling that where we will have to work in future, and the jobs that we can get is being decided by fortune has lead to plenty of outraged Facebook statuses and the like, but sadly there is little that can be done. Despite this feeling that it was luck-based, everyone (myself included) practiced as much as possible for it in the hope to get better scores. It would be stupid not to. I got a couple of books out of the library and have signed up to Pastest for exam revision (generally seen to be one of the better online question banks) as they also have SJT practice questions available.

The problem was, the books all contradicted each other. I looked at three in the end, 250 SJTs, the Oxford Assess one and a Third one. Of the three, I preferred the Oxford Assess one, though in some way or other they all contradicted one another at certain points. If they cannot agree on answers to questions, then how are we meant to be able to guess ourselves! Often picking the best one or two answers is pretty easy, but it is when ranking the 'inappropriate' ones that things get difficult. If the answers are all wrong, it is hard to decide which are more and less wrong. For example, in Pastest, there is a question about walking in on your registrar watching pornography in the mess, and you have to chose what to do about it. Pastest have decided that calling the police 'ranks higher' than doing nothing at all. I disagreed with this, as what interest would the police have in something which is not a criminal matter? Sure, it is very unprofessional, but I don't think the police would come and perform an arrest (though if it involved children I am sure it would be a very different story). I filled in a box at the bottom of the pastest page, saying I disagreed, and I got a very snotty email back from them telling me I was being foolish, and linking me to this article (which tells us the police did not bring charges anyway). I was impressed that they replied, and backed up their argument with a newspaper story, though. Despite this, the next day I was doing questions from the 250 SJTs book, and the exact same question came up, very almost word for word. the 250 SJT book had different answers, and told me that the police definitely wouldn't be called, as they were not breaking the law, and the police wouldn't be able to do anything. Crazy.

Anyway, the test went OK, though it is very hard to tell how well something that seems to have very little basis on fact went. I am not sure if the practice I did before helped, but at least if I do poorly and do end up working somewhere I don't want, I will not feel that it is through lack of trying. This whole section has turned into a bit of a rant about this test, so I am sorry about that!

In other news, this week I also spent time in gynaecology clinics, antenatal clinics and practising suturing with a very friendly consultant who will hopefully let me practice on real patients next week. The gynaecology team is lovely and very inclusive, so hopefully I will have a lot more to talk about next week when I am not raging about this test...

I will keep you updated on how my application goes, though I will not find out until February.