Ophthalmology Fact Fixer 240 MCQs with explanatory answers Chung Nen Chua Li Wern Voon and Siddhartha Goel Radcliffe Medical Press MN 00 KYZ1-ANR-JSA418 Marcham Road Abingdon Oxon OX14 TAA United Kingdom www.radcliffe-oxford.com The Radcliffe Medical Press electronic catalogue and online ordering facility. Direct sales to anywhere in the world. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. ISBN 1 85775 908 7 Typeset by Aarontype Ltd, Easton, Bristol Printed and bound by Tj International Ltd, Padstow, CornwallHow to master MCQs Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are an effective way of assessing the candidate's knowledge and are an important part of the final MRCOphth/MRCS. Apart from possessing good knowledge of the subject, we suggest the following tips which we hope will help you excel in the examination. Remember to answer enough questions The questions featured in the MRCOphth/MRCS/FRCS examinations are similar. Each question has five parts to be answered. Answers may be True, False or Don’t know. +1 mark is given for a correct answer and —1 mark for an incorrect one. No marks are given or deducted for an unanswered question. This system of marking is called nega- tive marking. The fear of making mistakes may lead to answering too few questions. If the pass mark is 50%, and only half of the questions have been answered with confidence, one may score poorly, as a significant number of answered questions may be wrong. It is recommended that candidates attempt two-thirds of the questions. While this implies making guesses for some of the questions, an intelligent guess based on some back- ground knowledge will more often be right than wrong. Tricks used by the examiners 1 Pay attention to the phrasing of the question. Phrases that contain the words ‘never’ or ‘always’ are usually false, whereas phrases with the word ‘may be’ are usually true. Good MCQs tend to avoid using these words as much as possible. Other examples are words such as ‘typical’ or ‘rarely’. A sentence may be correct in essence, but not when these phrases are used. For example: