Must not miss core

The handful of things a marker will not forgive, written from your own notes and readable at a glance.

The must not miss core is the model-answer skeleton: the points an examiner marks against, in the order they matter, with the actual numbers in them. It is not a summary of the board and it is not everything the notes contain — it is what cannot be left out.

Three to six sections, ordered by importance, each carrying concrete content rather than headings that gesture at content. Doses, thresholds, durations, named criteria, drug names, exactly as your own notes give them.

Must not miss coreMelanoma

Excision margins by Breslow: in situ 5 mm, 1 mm or less 1 cm, 1-2 mm 1-2 cm, over 2 mm 2 cm, all to fascia

Offer sentinel lymph node biopsy from T1b (0.8 mm, or thinner with ulceration) upward; it stages and prognosticates, it does not treat

Ulceration upstages every T category; record Breslow to 0.1 mm

Every case to the melanoma MDT before definitive management is agreed

Follow-up includes full skin examination and self-examination advice, not the scar alone

The core for one board: five things a marker will not forgive.

Where it shows up#

On the board. The core strip sits in the board's own title tile in study mode. Build it once and it stays; opening it pushes the board down rather than scrolling inside a heading, because a checklist you have to scroll is one you skim.
Beside the thing being marked. The exam, the oral tab, an attempt's score sheet and the results screen all open the same panel. On an exam paper the core is written from the paper's own questions rather than from the board, so reading it before you sit is revising exactly what is about to be asked.

Opening the core during an attempt is recorded on that attempt. It is not a penalty — it is so a 90 per cent scored with the skeleton open is not mistaken later for a 90 per cent scored without it.

A core is stamped with the board it was built from. Change the board underneath it and the strip says so and offers to rebuild; it will not quietly go stale on you.

The one place we are not terse#

Everything else the platform writes is kept short on purpose — cards are one fact, station criteria are a phrase, a marking comment is a sentence or two. The core is the exception, and deliberately so. It is what somebody reads in the ten minutes before they walk into the room, so it carries the specifics instead of pointing at them. "Start systemic corticosteroid" is a failed item where the notes say which, how much and for how long.

Four writers, one artefact#

Four different generators produce a core, from four different sources:

the station's, written with an oral station from its own marking material;
the paper's, written from an exam paper's questions and marking keys;
the standalone one, for a station that was written before cores existed;
the attempt's, which comes back as part of an evaluation after you have answered.

They are separate calls because they read different material, but they share their wording on purpose and are retuned together — 3 to 8 items a section, up to 30 words an item. Tightening one of them alone is how the same board ends up producing a dense checklist after a viva and a thin one before it, which is exactly the drift the shared wording exists to prevent.