Awesome Review is a live, six-day ABIM certification course — attended in person or by live stream and explicitly not pre-recorded — with a large syllabus and course-embedded questions. Its strength is concentrated expert teaching; its risk is decay, because six days of dense input without a retrieval loop fade fast. This workflow is for the busy internal medicine trainee who has booked or attended the course and wants each session converted into spaced, exam-format retrieval so what they hear in the room survives to test day.
What Awesome Review gives you to work with
Because the course is delivered live, your review assets afterwards are the syllabus, your own notes and the supplementary video — not a re-watchable lecture library. That single fact makes the recall-and-test loop below more important, not less.
| Attribute | What we could confirm (last checked 20 July 2026) |
|---|---|
| Product type | Live ABIM certification and recertification review course; in person at multiple locations or live real-time streaming, explicitly not pre-recorded |
| Format | 63 hours across six days, delivered by a single educator (vendor-reported) |
| Materials | 600+ pages of study materials; over 12 hours of supplementary video after the course (vendor-reported) |
| Questions | Nearly 2,000 board-relevant questions included in the materials (vendor-reported); course-embedded, not a large online adaptive bank |
| CME / MOC | 63 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits and 63 ABIM MOC points (vendor-reported) |
| AI / adaptive | None mentioned |
| Access / replay | Live delivery; no on-demand replay option mentioned — verify on awesomereview.com |
| Price | Not stated on the page — verify on awesomereview.com |
| ABIM components | The written knowledge base for the certification MCQ exam; not a substitute for the timed, four-session computer-based exam experience |
Every figure above is vendor-reported; confirm the current course dates, price and materials on awesomereview.com.
The exam you are preparing for
The ABIM Internal Medicine certification examination is a computer-based test of up to 240 single-best-answer questions, delivered in four sessions of up to 60 questions each across roughly ten hours at Pearson VUE. The blueprint weights content by category: Cardiovascular Disease leads at about 15%, followed by Endocrinology and Metabolism, Gastroenterology, Infectious Disease, and Rheumatology and Orthopaedics at about 10% each, Pulmonary at about 8%, Nephrology and Medical Oncology at about 6%, and a long tail of smaller categories. Questions are also spread across task types — diagnosis and testing, treatment and care decisions, risk assessment and prognosis, and pathophysiology and basic science — so preparation has to train reasoning, not just recall. That four-session, ten-hour, single-best-answer format is what your retrieval practice must eventually resemble, and it is exactly what a live didactic course cannot reproduce.
Step one: prime each module with a short diagnostic
Before you engage a syllabus section — ideally the evening before that live day, or immediately before you open the notes afterwards — answer five or six questions on the topic cold. You will get some wrong, and that is the point: the failures create a reason to attend and mark the concepts your brain should be hunting for during teaching. Priming converts passive listening into targeted listening, and it takes ten minutes.
Step two: watch or read in bounded segments, then recall
During the live sessions you cannot pause or rewind, so your job in the room is to capture structure, not transcribe. Afterwards, work the syllabus in bounded segments of one topic at a time, then close the book and produce a concise recall from memory — the three or four decisions that define the topic — before checking your notes. The act of retrieving before verifying is what builds durable memory; re-reading until it feels familiar does not.
Step three: convert each objective into three prompts
For every learning objective, write three things: one discrimination question that forces a choice between two plausible diagnoses or drugs, one management rule stated as a single sentence, and one "why not the alternative?" prompt that names the tempting wrong answer and explains why it loses. Three prompts per objective turns a page of syllabus into a testable, exam-shaped unit and doubles as your revision deck for the final fortnight.
Step four: test with fresh questions at 24–48 hours, then again after an interval
Within a day or two of covering a topic, test it with fresh questions — some from the course materials, but increasingly from an unseen bank so you are practising retrieval rather than recognition. Then test it again after a longer interval of a week or more. Do not replay the same items as revision; a question you have already answered measures memory of that question, not mastery of the topic. Spacing the second test is where the retention is won.
Step five: build a weekly mixed block
Once a week, sit a mixed block that ignores course order — forty items spanning several syllabus sections plus one or two you have not touched recently. Course sequence is a powerful and misleading cue; on exam day the topics arrive shuffled, so your practice has to shuffle them too. A mixed block is also the closest weekly approximation of the four-session paper, and the iatroX ABIM bank is a straightforward place to draw the unseen items that keep the block honest.
Step six: exit on performance, not on completion
Finishing the syllabus or watching all the supplementary video is not the finish line. The signal that you are ready is a rising score on unseen, timed, mixed blocks — and a shrinking gap between your performance on seen and unseen items. Completion percentage measures activity; unseen performance measures readiness, which is why a Q-bank percentage is not your exam score.
Worked example: a seven-day consolidation week
Take a representative week after the course, revising three high-weight areas — cardiovascular, endocrinology and infectious disease. Monday: prime cardiovascular with six questions, work the syllabus section, write recall prompts. Tuesday: a thirty-item timed unseen cardiovascular block, misses logged by task type — diagnosis, treatment or prognosis. Wednesday: prime and work endocrinology, then convert its objectives into prompts. Thursday: a thirty-item unseen endocrinology block plus a re-test of Tuesday's worst misses. Friday: infectious disease the same way. Saturday: a forty-item mixed block across all three areas plus a neglected topic such as haematology, timed. Sunday: review the error log, not the syllabus, and set next week from the patterns it shows. Across the week, Awesome Review does the teaching and iatroX supplies the unseen measurement; no proprietary-algorithm claim is involved, only fresh items scored honestly.
Decision checklist: continue, supplement, switch or stop
| Signal (measurable) | Action |
|---|---|
| Unseen mixed-block scores rising; seen-versus-unseen gap closing | Continue the loop; you are on track |
| Knowledge solid but reasoning and task-type errors persist | Supplement with more unseen, mixed practice |
| Course questions exhausted and you cannot see per-topic performance | Supplement with a dedicated bank for volume and analytics |
| Two to three weeks out and still re-reading rather than testing | Stop re-reading; move to full-length mixed blocks |
Bottom line
Awesome Review delivers concentrated, expert ABIM teaching in a live format, and for a trainee who learns well from a taught week it is a strong foundation. What it cannot do — because it is live and time-bounded — is reproduce the four-session, unseen, timed exam or space your retrieval for you. Wrap the course in a watch–recall–test–retest loop, measure on unseen items, and let that trend, not the completion of the syllabus, tell you when you are ready.
Frequently asked questions
Is Awesome Review enough for ABIM on its own? For a well-prepared trainee it can be a strong foundation, but few candidates should rely on the live course alone, because its value fades without spaced retrieval and its roughly 2,000 embedded questions are a finite, seen set rather than a large unseen bank. Use the course to build knowledge fast, then convert it into spaced, unseen practice; confirm the current materials and question count on awesomereview.com.
Which ABIM component does Awesome Review not reproduce well? The examination format itself — four sessions of up to sixty single-best-answer questions across about ten hours — is the part a six-day taught course cannot recreate, along with the stamina and pacing of a full unseen paper. Awesome Review builds the knowledge base; it does not simulate the timed, sectioned computer-based test, so rehearse that separately with full-length timed blocks.
How many Awesome Review questions should I complete per day for ABIM? Use the course questions as consolidation immediately after each topic, but because they are a finite seen set, do not treat completing them as your daily target. Aim instead for thirty to forty timed questions per study day in the final weeks, weighted towards unseen items so you are training retrieval rather than re-recognising familiar stems. The precise course-question total is vendor-reported and should be checked on awesomereview.com.
When should I stop using Awesome Review and move to mixed mocks? Once you have worked through the syllabus and your errors are about clinical reasoning and task type rather than missing knowledge, usually two to three weeks out, shift decisively to full-length, mixed, unseen blocks. Keep the syllabus and supplementary videos for targeted review of a weakness a mock exposes, but make timed mixed practice your main activity from that point.
How should I combine Awesome Review with iatroX without duplicating practice? Give the course the teaching job and iatroX the measurement job: study a topic from the Awesome Review materials, then test it on fresh iatroX items you have not seen, and log the misses rather than re-answering the course questions as revision. This keeps the two sources complementary under the two-Q-bank principle — one builds, the other checks transfer — and the seen-versus-unseen gap it reveals is your clearest readiness signal.
Editorial notes and references
Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 20 July 2026. Figures for Awesome Review — course hours, page and question counts, supplementary video, CME and MOC credits, format, replay availability and price — are vendor-reported and time-sensitive; the public page did not state a price, so verify all of these on awesomereview.com. Disclosure: iatroX operates a competing question bank, including an ABIM bank; this workflow confines iatroX's role to the unseen-measurement layer and does not position it as a replacement for Awesome Review's teaching. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com.
References: American Board of Internal Medicine — exam blueprint and format (abim.org); Awesome Review course pages (awesomereview.com); iatroX ABIM bank (iatrox.com/abim-internal-medicine); iatroX comparison hub (iatrox.com/compare); and "Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score" (iatrox.com).