Just took my RPVI exam today and passed well above the cutoff. I have to say that going into this exam I was more nervous than for Echo or Nuclear just based on what people have posted here/on reddit as well as the limited resources I had available to study from. At my institution we don't have a formal vascular rotation and prep primarily from self-learning and the minimum cases needed to meet testing requirements. I'm posting this to offer a counter-point based on my experience with the exam.
What I can say from my experience is that after studying for 1 month, the exam is very fair and majority of the questions are on the commonly tested concepts with multiple questions repeated over and over again testing the same concept. For example, I had more than 4-5 questions testing what a continuous venous waveform with lack of phasicity means, how to recognize a retrograde vertebral artery waveforms, loss of diastolic flow with distal occlusion, parvus tardus waveforms for proximal occlusion, and how to interpret very clear segmental pressure differences to localize level of disease.
I saw several posts here where people seem to think Pegasus is the gold standard but then they also say that it's not enough. I only had outdated Pegasus videos from the 2010s and skipped the entire physics section which was like 10 hours of content. Even the clinical content from Pegasus was too dry, making me space out and end up playing video games or watching youtube at the same time. The physics on the exam was very simple (PRF, aliasing, PW vs CW, refraction/reverberation artifacts).
I used primarily the oakstone RPVI videos which were a lot shorter and easier to get through. I felt that it was enough as they emphasized pretty much all of the main tested concepts and it seemed legitimate since it was made by one of the people in charge of the RPVI testing division.
Overall, I think the test was a lot easier than echo, similar in difficulty to Nuclear. If you have access to QBanks, great. But if you don't, as long as you prep sufficiently with one resource and learn the key concepts (there aren't many), you'll be well prepared for the exam. There were very few zebra questions on things I haven't seen as even the test zebras were common ones emphasized in all the prep courses (popliteal cystic adventitial disease, carotid body tumor, etc).
I will add however that this is just my anecdotal experience as I usually have no issues with standardized testing. Take it with a grain of salt based on how you've historically done on other tests.
What I can say from my experience is that after studying for 1 month, the exam is very fair and majority of the questions are on the commonly tested concepts with multiple questions repeated over and over again testing the same concept. For example, I had more than 4-5 questions testing what a continuous venous waveform with lack of phasicity means, how to recognize a retrograde vertebral artery waveforms, loss of diastolic flow with distal occlusion, parvus tardus waveforms for proximal occlusion, and how to interpret very clear segmental pressure differences to localize level of disease.
I saw several posts here where people seem to think Pegasus is the gold standard but then they also say that it's not enough. I only had outdated Pegasus videos from the 2010s and skipped the entire physics section which was like 10 hours of content. Even the clinical content from Pegasus was too dry, making me space out and end up playing video games or watching youtube at the same time. The physics on the exam was very simple (PRF, aliasing, PW vs CW, refraction/reverberation artifacts).
I used primarily the oakstone RPVI videos which were a lot shorter and easier to get through. I felt that it was enough as they emphasized pretty much all of the main tested concepts and it seemed legitimate since it was made by one of the people in charge of the RPVI testing division.
Overall, I think the test was a lot easier than echo, similar in difficulty to Nuclear. If you have access to QBanks, great. But if you don't, as long as you prep sufficiently with one resource and learn the key concepts (there aren't many), you'll be well prepared for the exam. There were very few zebra questions on things I haven't seen as even the test zebras were common ones emphasized in all the prep courses (popliteal cystic adventitial disease, carotid body tumor, etc).
I will add however that this is just my anecdotal experience as I usually have no issues with standardized testing. Take it with a grain of salt based on how you've historically done on other tests.
