Lectures
The examiner writes a script from this board's notes and reads it aloud, with a transcript that highlights as it plays and seeks to any word you click.
A lecture is one of your boards, spoken. On the board's Lecture tab, the examiner set for that subject writes a script from the board's own notes and reads it aloud, so the board can be revised while you are walking, driving or cooking. The script uses what the notes say and nothing beyond them — it teaches the connections between them rather than reciting the board in order, and it never adds a fact of its own.
Transcript · tap any word to jump there
So the number that decides almost everything downstream is the Breslow thickness, and it is worth being clear that it is measured on the excision specimen, not guessed from the surface.
Take the margins in order. In situ, five millimetres. Up to one millimetre, one centimetre. One to two millimetres, one to two centimetres, and the choice there is usually about where the lesion sits. Over two millimetres, two centimetres.
Sentinel node biopsy is the one people get muddled about, because it is a staging test and not a treatment. It comes into the conversation at T1b, and it is an offer rather than a discussion once you are past a millimetre.
Writing one#
Two steps, and the first one is cheap. Suggest lectures reads the board and comes back with four to six titles — usually a synthesis that pulls several sections together, a deep dive on one, a comparison of things that get confused with each other, and one on what gets examined hardest. Titles and one line each, nothing spoken yet.
Before suggesting, you set two things: how long you have got (5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes) and whether the lecture covers the whole board or only sections you tick. The length is yours rather than the model's — it is how much time you have, which nothing else can know — so the script is written to fill it, at roughly a hundred and fifty spoken words a minute. The length an idea was planned for is stamped on it, so changing the pills later does not retro-fit an idea you already paid for.
Record then writes the script and speaks it. The first part starts playing within a few seconds while the rest is still being read, which is why the pill says "Recording the rest…" over a scrubber that is still growing. The finished recording is kept, so playing that lecture again later is instant and costs nothing. A lecture whose audio could not be kept shows as Script only and is spoken again the next time you play it.
Read along#
The whole script sits under the player, and it is not decoration: every word in it is a button. Click one and the audio jumps to that word and carries on from there. That is the only navigation a single audio file has — you cannot skim a recording, but you can point at the sentence you want to hear again.
While it plays, the word being spoken is highlighted and the transcript scrolls itself to keep up, unless you have scrolled back to re-read something, in which case it leaves you alone.
Sentinel node biopsy is a staging test and not a treatment, which is the distinction most candidates lose the mark on.
The timings are measured by listening to the recording back once, when it is first spoken, so the highlight follows the voice rather than a word count. They are kept beside the audio, so replaying a lecture reads along for free. A lecture recorded on the phone is paced by its length instead until it has been measured — the highlight still tracks and every word still seeks, it is just less exact.
What the examiner does here#
Three things, and they are worth stating exactly, because a lecture is not marked:
- Accent and register. The speech direction on your examiner persona is what the voice is told to use, plus one fixed instruction to teach rather than mark — unhurried, conversational. The synthesised voice itself is the same one for every examiner; what changes is how it is directed to speak.
- Who it is pitched at. The script is written for the learner your exam expects, so a lecture on the same board reads differently for a postgraduate clinical exam than for an undergraduate one.
- The stamp. Every recording records which examiner made it, and every row on the tab says so.
The marking criteria that run your written papers and your vivas do not reach the lecture prompts. Nothing you listen to here is scored, and listening changes nothing about your cards, your marks or your due queue.
Switching examiner#
A lecture keeps the voice it was written in. Changing the subject's examiner afterwards leaves every existing recording exactly as it was — the row simply says which examiner it was made for, and warns you when that is no longer the one in force.
The idea it was written from stays on the shelf for that reason. It is not consumed by being recorded, so the same title can be recorded again for the new examiner, and the shelf shows "Recorded for …" once per examiner it has been spoken by. That second recording is a new one rather than a conversion: reading a script aloud is a fresh pile of speech calls, billed like the first, so it is offered rather than done for you.