Practicalities of the oral exam

• The viva or structured oral examination consists of four 30-minute orals: trauma, adult elective orthopaedics, children’s orthopaedics/hand and upper limb and applied basic sciences. Each viva section lasts 30 minutes during which time you will be asked six questions.
• Examiners are encouraged to keep their own discussion to a minimum to allow candidates the maximum opportunity to speak and score marks.
• Questions are set at the level of a newly appointed consultant at day one in a District General Hospital. The questions consist of a default question, competency question and advanced question.
• The FRCS (Tr & Orth) is a structured blueprinted exam. The material on which candidates are to be tested is made available to examiners on each morning of the exams.
• Each oral exam is divided into two halves lasting 15 minutes each. One examiner asks three questions of approximately 5 minutes ‘to read minutes’ duration whilst the other examiner makes notes. At the first bell (15 minutes) the examiners reverse roles and a further three questions are asked.
• Each pair of examiners will decide between themselves which half of the oral exam (and three questions) they are going to take with the exception of the children’s orthopaedics/hand and upper limb section in which an examiner is already allocated to each specialty well in advance of the exams.¹
• The examiner who is not asking questions will be writing detailed notes, which inform the marking process. This is used for feedback purposes for unsuccessful candidates. Notes need to be objective, fair, balanced and informative and deal with what was actually said by candidates, rather than a vague subjective statement that may be difficult to defend if a failed candidate challenges the decision. Comments need to be factually correct, phrased in a professional manner and no comment should be made that the examiner would not be prepared to make to the candidate in person.
• The examiners independently assess the performance in each of the six questions. The two examiners do not confer and as such any accusations that one examiner may exert undue pressure on the other during the marking process is avoided.
• It is important not to be too discouraged or downhearted should an oral exam question go particularly badly. You must leave it behind you, remain focused and hope that you can redeem the situation by answering the other oral exam questions well. The same sentiments apply if, say, the trauma or adult general orthopaedics oral goes poorly. Again, stay focused and put things behind you as sometimes you can lose all sense of perspective in gauging how well or otherwise you are performing. There are classic stories of candidates thinking that they have badly failed an oral only to gain a good pass but then failing the subsequent oral as they were too distracted with worries that followed them into the next oral exam. Today there is really no excuse for carrying forward negative sentiments from one oral into another. At the very worst, examiners are only allowed to give you neutral feedback even if you have performed extremely badly. At the beginning of the millennium examiners frequently made very discouraging and negative comments during an oral exam if you were performing poorly. Candidates were left in little doubt that they were going to be failed in that section of the exam.