BoardSim is an oral board simulator for anesthesiology residents. You practise answering out loud, on the clock, against an examiner that behaves the way a real one does.

Margaret Bowman-Chiu and Hamza Yunis, of the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at the University of Louisville.

BoardSim is funded by the Sessler Award from the University of Louisville Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine. That funding is what keeps the examiner free to use. You will never be asked to pay, and you will never be asked for a credit card.

Knowing the material and saying it out loud under pressure are two different skills, and only one of them gets practised regularly. Out-loud practice usually means finding a faculty member with a free hour, and there are never enough of those hours to go round. The idea here is to give you as much spoken practice as you want, whenever you want it.

You can, and it will hold a conversation with you. What you will notice is that the examiner drifts. It starts coaching. It tells you when you are right. It teaches in the middle of a question, softens after a wrong answer, or wanders off the case entirely. We have built checks around our examiner to hold it to proper ABA examiner behaviour: no hints, no encouragement, no teaching until the case is over. We test it against those rules rather than trusting it to stay in character on its own.

This is meant to be a free resource and we intend to keep it that way. What we are working towards is a library of vetted cases with humans in the loop, reviewed by people who know the material rather than generated and published unchecked.

We are still working out the bugs. We would rather you had the chance to practise now than wait for us to polish it, so if something breaks or could be better, use the Feedback button in the corner of any screen and tell us.