Amboss is one of the most popular question banks among medical students. It contains a library of articles and practice questions that have been vetted by and peer reviewed. What exactly is the appeal behind the use of the question bank. For me personally there are many features that Amboss has which I have found to be very effective. In this article I discuss the 10 features that make the Amboss Question bank worth spending money on

Anatomy quizzes

Amboss contains short anatomy quizzes for every organ system. These quizzes are on labeled images that correspond to a certain sub section of an anatomical region. One thing, that I really like about these quizzes is that they are incorporated with the Amboss questions themselves. For example, if you get a question wrong about the ligation of the uterine artery during a hysterectomy, Amboss immediately pulls up the image of Female reproductive organs. This image contains an option to take a quiz on the labels of this anatomical image.

Create custom quiz based on article

Amboss is one of the few question banks which allows you to make quizzes based off  particular articles. This ability to  customize practice sessions allows users to have a very tailored study experience. 

Caption and overlay feature

When looking at different radiological images, histological images, stains and EKGs, it is often difficult to identify pathognomonic features. Amboss’ overlay feature makes this a lot easier y highlighting an important aspect of a picture.

Video links to other resources:

Certain topics contain helpful video links from other helpful sources such as Osmosis. Having these videos along with the articles helps to solidify the information and clarify the topics.  

Additionally  this feature eliminates the trouble of having to navigate through out the internet to find a good video on the topic

Highlight and underline features

• Red underline: After you take a quiz, the next time you visit the article that quiz was based on, Amboss will underline the information that you got incorrect in red. This helps to point attention to mistakes and weaknesses in knowledge
• Green underline: Amboss uses a green underline to pin point important information in question stems when you use the “study mode to take custom quizzes”
• Yellow Highlight feature: Amboss allows gives you the option to to turn on the highlight feature which is located at the top of every article page. This feature basically highlights the most important and hgh yield information that you should know. This makes studying more efficient and significantly reduces any wasted time on information that is less likely to appear on exams.

Easy to keep track of quiz attempts

It is very easy to resume a quiz that you were previously taking. There are some question banks that do not track your exam attempts so once you log out you are unable to resume the test from where you left off. Amboss however however saves all of your quiz data allowing you to continue when return to the interface.

Additionally, the Amboss platform allows you to name all of your quizzes so that you dont get confused as to which quiz contains what.

Table quizzes and other short quizzes

Articles are linked together:

Many of the articles in the Amboss articles are alluded to or linked to in other articles on the platform. For example If I do not understand topic”x” When I go onto read about topic “y,” the article on topic y will mention or explain how topic x is relevant. 

Additionally many of the article quizzes repeat questions from other quizzes. This means that if you follow the study plan you will be getting a high volume of spaced repetition which is a critical component of learning in medical school. This integration of material throughout the articles is very helpful for pattern recognition and long term retention

Constant Repetition of questions

The Amboss question Bank is one of the few question banks which drill certain topics into your head through showing multiple versions of the questions in their article quizzes. Many question banks tend to show a question related to a topic once but then have no other questions related to that topic. This leaves the user with not a strong enough grasp of the concept because they only have 1 question to go off of. For me this feature from Amboss has been paramount in my studies. These repeated question types can be seen in the two images below

As you can see there are many features that make the  Amboss question Bank worth spending money on. While there are many options out there to choose from, I definitely do not believe any of them have nearly the amount of effective features as Amboss does. I would highly Recommend making the investment into becoming