advice from recent test takers

[njmedstudent973]

Hey this is to anyone who recently took the exam:
1. How high yield is the nomenclature of viruses on the exam? I know the guy from DIT mentions that its not important and doesnt cover which viruses are negative stranded vs positive stranded or helical etc. Did you guys find this to be true or where there a lot of questions that dealt with this?
2. How crucial is it to memorize the chromosome location for certain diseases or cancer related genes? I mean i know them now after reviewing but is it crucial to remember each and everyone of them?
3. I know they say Uworldself assessment exams overestimate your actual score by a lot ..but by a lot has anyone noticed that it drastically overestimated your score by say like 40 points or so? I've had a 40 point difference between my uworldself assessment and my last nbme, granted that i took the nbme three weeks before but i was just passing it then and with the uworldself assement it shows that id do pretty well with a 230+ and all I did in between was start DIT again and read through some but not all of FA.
Thanks for any advice

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[SoCar]

1. i had one question - it gave the description of the viral illness (think it was mumps) and asked what family the virus was in
2. i had zero
3. mine overestimated by 5 points and i took it 2 weeks before my test.

of course everyone's experience is different, but that was my test

 

[Ravendown]

I think I had maybe 1 question. I didn't study that much at all and just picked an answer and went on. Score = 230+

You just have to pick your strengths and know how much you are willing to study a subject. I wasn't going to drill those names and nomen- for a long time so I spent little time on them. Not that much to do there.

 

[just one]

1) I had zero questions
2) I'd know the major ones, like the ones repeated in uworld
3) I've taken notice of most peoples posts that show uworld assessments and nbmes along with actual score. I've come to the conclusion that uworld comes closer than nbmes. Uworld MAY slightly overestimate but in the majority of posts nbmes underestimate much more than the overestimation of uworld. I only took uworld assessments, uwsa1 5 days before my exam, and uwsa2 the day before. Uwsa underestimated by 8 points and uwsa2 by 4 points. Real score was >235. I did take the NBME comprehensive basic science exam because our school mandated it, took it 7 weeks before real deal. It was 46 points below actual score, but I don't really count it because it was so far in advance I had only finished falcon. I still hadn't covered uworld, FA, or goljan.......but I only finished uworld, never finished FA or goljan

 

[Allsta2003]

Hey this is to anyone who recently took the exam:
1. How high yield is the nomenclature of viruses on the exam? I know the guy from DIT mentions that its not important and doesnt cover which viruses are negative stranded vs positive stranded or helical etc. Did you guys find this to be true or where there a lot of questions that dealt with this?
2. How crucial is it to memorize the chromosome location for certain diseases or cancer related genes? I mean i know them now after reviewing but is it crucial to remember each and everyone of them?
3. I know they say Uworldself assessment exams overestimate your actual score by a lot ..but by a lot has anyone noticed that it drastically overestimated your score by say like 40 points or so? I've had a 40 point difference between my uworldself assessment and my last nbme, granted that i took the nbme three weeks before but i was just passing it then and with the uworldself assement it shows that id do pretty well with a 230+ and all I did in between was start DIT again and read through some but not all of FA.
Thanks for any advice

just thought i'd jump in on this.. i took the exam yesterday, and i had at least 3 questions that required the knowledge of virus "nomenclature".. whether it was ssRNA, +/-, etc. the questions didnt ask those facts directly, but if you didnt know the categories of the viruses, you couldnt answer the questions