This week, the ABR quietly dropped a big change in their long-term plans for the new oral board version of the Certifying Exam. After the very first administration in early 2028 during fellowship for the class of 2027, subsequent administrations will occur at the end of residency:
That’s the email I got as a program director.
As in, in 2028, diagnostic radiology, as a field, will again be graduating board-certified (not “board eligible”) radiologists.
The decision to change the (useless, duplicative) Certifying Exam was first announced back in February 2023. In April 2023, they then announced their intention to bring back the oral boards.
The original plan was to keep the timing the same despite the change in format, so that residents would take the exam during the calendar year after graduating from residency, typically a few months into their first post-fellowship attending job. Despite the reality that orals would be much harder to prepare for outside of the residency training environment than a written exam, the ABR referred to this timing as “the least bad choice.”
In that “Backwards to the Future” article, I wrote:
This exam needs to be at the end of residency like it used to be. If anything, it might help combat the post-Core senioritis that many fourth-years struggle with, particularly when rotating through services outside of their chosen specialty. I appreciate that many program directors don’t want this during residency because in the past seniors used to disappear from service (and especially the call pool) before Orals just like they do now before the Core Exam. It’s easier to run a residency with only one class preparing for one big test at a time. But convenience shouldn’t be our primary metric.
Time will tell. I think I had it right in 2023, and clearly enough stakeholders agreed that the ABR has changed its plan before even doing it a single time.
In order to prevent two classes disappearing concurrently in June for their respective boards, the Core Exam has been pushed back into early/fall R4 year so that the senior year will now contain both board exams. Even with that scheduling mitigation, residencies have a lot of work to do to make this happen.