Having silently used these forums since way back in my shelf exam days to look for exam prep hints, I thought I'd take two minutes to finally post something for future readers. Overall, I did pretty well during residency, but was never a strong ITE performer. I ended up with about 3 solid weeks to focus on prep for this exam, and I was pretty worried about it. I passed with a score slightly above the mean. This was higher than my ITE scores during residency.
My strategy and sources:
First, I hit it hard. 8-10 hour days, 4 days on, 1/2 day off. Breaks every 45m in the beginning (plus lunch and dinner), then I gradually increased the length of each session until I was doing two hours each session towards the end (wanted my endurance up for the real deal)
My primary source, despite the growing number of comments about it's age, was Hall. And it served me very well. Everything on my test was in that book (with the one exception of statistics, which I had to outsource). But I quite honestly MEMORIZED those explanations I did them so much. I'd do the questions, and then make lists of notes from the answer section. Only if there was something that I didn't understand, or I knew I'd had trouble remembering in the past, did I go to another source (I'd look it up in Miller or online). I'd read through all of my notes each night before bed and first thing when I got up (only took 15m or so). The only other source I used consistently was ACE questions. Right from the beginning I thought they were too easy, and I was scoring very high 70s to very low 80s. But it turns out that though the actual ACE questions are easier than the exam questions, a lot of the exam questions are just "shifted" a bit to make them more tricky - the basic questions are the same style and, if you can see through it, the same conceptual or topical difficulty. I did 8 or 9 years worth of ACE questions (maybe it was fewer actual years because of the A and B sections, I'm not sure). I also used the old ITE exams as endurance training, doing one full exam, timed, every four or five days.
People are always trying to correlate percentages, so I'll say that at the end I was consistently getting mid to upper 70s on ITE questions and upper 80s on ACE questions. These percentages held pretty solid from 20 questions to 120 questions at a time.
Things that I dabbled with:
- The Matthes Book - I didn't pick this up until the last 10 days or so, so I was pretty tired and didn't have the energy to totally start over. That being the case, I only got through 500 questions or so. This book looked pretty good in terms of questions and their difficulty level, but I don't think the explanations were as helpful as Hall. The thing with Hall is that you might start out reading an explanation about MH, and end up walking through g proteins, pharmacology, and some immunology. I can't state strongly enough how helpful Hall was within the context of how I used it (basically used the explanations as a narrative source and took good notes)
- Big Blue - Hated it. There's too much stuff (for me) to just memorize a bunch of charts, numbers, and names. But that's really what Big Blue wants you to do. I got really tired, really fast, of his "Rangers MUST MEMORIZE this bullet list of 50 items" three times on every page. The material is repetitive, outdated, and some of it is outright wrong. I dropped this after a few days and didn't miss it
- M5 - Everyone seems to really like this, but having not used it during residency, I didn't find it to be good as a focused review resource. I think it would be terrific as a "do the whole thing over and over during residency" resource, in the sense of long term exam prep. My biggest issue with M5 was that it seemed to be written to be tricky, and put me in the wrong mindset for actual exam questions. After going through a hundred or so questions, I found that I was concentrating more on "how is this guy trying to trick me this time" rather than focusing on the idea of the question. I'll agree that the topics are good, and it covers a lot, but it also covers a lot of things in WAY too much depth, and tends to digress away from the thrust of questions into the authors showing off how smart they are (and then ending with "but you probably don't have to know all that for the exam"). Overall, it felt very "academic" to me. As I said, I wish that I had used it all the way through residency, when it would have been a killer resource for learning things the first time, but I just didn't find it to be the right tone, the right difficulty, or focused enough, to be a good prep tool. There are also a fair number of subtle errors (one on fentanyl vs morphine screwed me up for about a week until I was in the bathroom one morning and thought "that just can't be right" and looked it up three other places to make sure) and "up/down" "high/low" typos that you'll have to be careful about.
- Old ITE Questions - I did some as a study tool, but probably only 200 or so. I decided that I just wasn't getting that much out of them without explanations, especially when I didn't agree with their answer (there are a good number of questions where more than one choice is conceivable, and I'd need the explanation to show me why the board picked the choice they did). What I did end up using these for was simple endurance training, as I noted above.
In a nutshell, Hall was still gold for me, and I spent the bulk of my review time with it. In the way I used it, I cannot think of a single resource that is stronger. Three weeks was the perfect amount of time for me, as I felt my stamina really decline suddenly towards the end.
Good luck to future readers of this thread. If I can do it, you can do it.