Monthly Quiz
About the monthly quiz
The monthly quiz is a short piece of clinical self-testing published on this page. A question is put, you commit to an answer, and the reasoning behind the answer is set out. It takes a few minutes and it is designed to be done between cases rather than set aside for an evening you will never get.
The value of the format is in the commitment. Reading a discussion of a topic produces a comfortable feeling of understanding that survives right up to the moment someone asks you to decide. Answering first, before you see the explanation, replaces that feeling with information: either you had it or you did not, and if you did not, you now know precisely where your reasoning broke.
What it tests
Questions are written around the kind of thinking clinical work actually demands, rather than around isolated recall:
- Interpretation. Reading a tracing, an image or a set of numbers and saying what it means, including when it means nothing much.
- Discrimination. Separating two conditions that present alike, on the feature that genuinely distinguishes them.
- Next step. Given what you now know, what you do first, what can wait, and what you are committing the patient to by choosing it.
- Threshold judgement. When to escalate, when to investigate further, and when the right answer is to stop and observe.
- Current practice. Where guidance or technology has moved, including areas such as newer therapies and the changing role of technology in cardiology, so that habits formed during training are checked against how the field stands now.
Where a question has more than one defensible answer, the discussion says so. Flattening genuine uncertainty into a single correct option teaches a confidence that will not hold at the bedside.
Who it is for
The quiz is written for practising clinicians and for those in training: physicians, cardiologists, residents and fellows, and the specialist nurses and technicians who work in cardiac units. Established clinicians use it as a low-cost check that a familiar area has not drifted out of date. Trainees use it as a way of finding gaps early, while there is still time to close them before an examination or before the gap turns up in a real patient.
There is no cost to attempting it and no obligation to do anything with the result other than notice it.
How it fits with the reference collections
A quiz question is a diagnostic instrument, not a course. It shows you where a gap is; closing the gap takes structured reading. That is where the reference material on this site comes in.
If a question exposes a weakness in an area you are about to be examined on, the exam preparation reference collection covers the same ground in the depth an examination expects, and the cardiology exam preparation bundles group that material into a defined set so preparation can start immediately rather than beginning with the task of assembling a reading list.
Used together, the two do different jobs: the quiz keeps telling you what you do not know, and the reference collections give you a systematic way to fix it.
