Just got my ABFAS Part II results back last week – passed with a solid margin after dreading the oral format for months. I'd heard plenty of stories about case presentations and examiner follow-up questions, so I wanted to share what actually helped without the pre-exam spiral.
I spent about 12 weeks preparing, averaging 2 to 3 hours per day outside of my surgical schedule. The case log review was where I put most of my energy – I went back through my 100-plus cases and made sure I could defend every decision I made, from approach selection to implant choice to how I handled complications. They're not looking for perfection, they're looking for sound clinical reasoning under pressure.
Biomechanics questions were the part I was least confident about going in. Foot and ankle biomechanics shows up in surgical planning context – if you alter this structure, what's the mechanical consequence downstream. I'd recommend dedicated time on radiographic measurements and their implications, especially for rearfoot and ankle cases.
Mock orals with a senior partner helped enormously. We did three 45-minute sessions over the last month. Having someone push back on your reasoning out loud is completely different from rehearsing in your head – my partner was demanding and that was exactly what I needed.
How many cases from your log did they pull questions from? I'm preparing for Part II next cycle and trying to figure out how deep I need to go on the entire log versus focusing on my most common procedure types.
Mock orals are non-negotiable in my opinion. Even if your partner isn't super critical, just getting used to articulating reasoning verbally under any pressure changes how you perform on the actual day.
The oral format really does separate people who know the material from people who know why they made each specific decision. The examiners are good at recognizing when someone is reciting versus actually reasoning through a case in real time.
Biomechanics caught me on my first attempt too. I knew the surgical techniques cold but the mechanical rationale questions exposed gaps. Second attempt I'd worked through radiographic measurements much more carefully and it was a completely different experience.
Thanks for this thread, it's been really helpful to read through. I'm sitting for DLM in September and just hit 78% on a full-length practice set yesterday, which honestly felt way better than I expected at this stage. Still shaky on the content area breakdowns though, so I've been grinding through the free dlm content areas material to tighten that up before I register.
Eight weeks out feels tight but I didn't want to wait until next cycle. Did you find the oral format threw you off more in the early practice rounds or closer to the actual date?
One thing that genuinely changed how I studied was DLM — deliberate lag method, basically spacing your review so you're hitting material right before you'd forget it. I didn't invent it, my PGY-3 mentor mentioned it offhand and I almost ignored it. Glad I didn't. Instead of cramming a chapter until it felt solid, I'd move on while it was still slightly uncomfortable, then come back 48-72 hours later. That return pass was where it actually stuck.
For oral boards specifically it's huge because you can't just pattern-match a multiple choice answer — you have to actually talk through your reasoning out loud in front of someone staring at you. If you've only reviewed something once until it felt "done," that confidence evaporates fast under pressure. But if you've retrieved it two or three times with gaps in between, it comes out smoother. It's not magic, it's just how memory works, and once I committed to it my case presentation confidence went up noticeably in the last few weeks.