1. The best time depends on your schedule and your school's curriculum. I think the worst time is the July/August of D4 year when you are applying. The summer between D1/2 is the earliest you should be taking it. You will have more academic obligations (class, labwork, +/- research) in D2 and more clinical obligations (patients, externships, research) in D3. I think you can take it a max of 6 times and the score is valid for a while. Don't worry about it expiring if you apply while in school.
2. Huge variation from person to person. It took me ~5 months. It's less about the time and more about the strategy. There is no good way to study and keep up with the dental curriculum, it sucks, you just have to do it.
3. Competitive scores are ~80+ for 6 years and ~75+ for 4 years.
4. Resources: (not an exhaustive list- these are what I have experience with between the CBSE and medical school)
Resources for practice questions/ reinforcement
- Uworld (high yield)
- AMBOSS (high yield)
- Past NBMEs (high yield)
- Anki (supplemental)
Resources for reference
- First Aid
- AMBOSS
Resources for learning material
- Pathoma (high yield)
- Boards and Beyond (high yield)
- Sketchy medicine (mid yield)
- Randy Neal MD (biostats) (supplemental)
- Dirty medicine youtube (supplemental)
- Pixorize (supplemental)
You should spend time looking into all of these, see what works for you, and have some combo of the 3 categories in your plan.
Tips:
I took the test twice. The first time was a "dry run" after studying for ~3 weeks. This allowed me to asses if my studying was on par with the test questions. After I got my score I was able to refine my approach for the second test. I found this helpful but expensive.
Make a calendar with topics and plan how much time you will spend on each system. Make sure there is some flexibility built in. Be realistic and keep your dental school schedule in mind. If you have a big exam, you will probably not do as much CBSE stuff that week- you can make up the time the following week.
Organize the topics logically. Topics like biochem, biostats, and psych are heavy on memorization and could be better at the end of your schedule, closer to the exam. Topics like endocrine, immunology, and basic pathology have many tie-ins to the other systems and I studied them first for this reason.
I split my schedule into 2 general phases- content learning (phase I) and review/reinforcement (Phase II). You cannot possibly master all of the content given the your other obligations. If you miss some content in phase I, you will see it in the questions in phase II and learn it then. I also used practice questions in phase I (mostly UWORLD) to reinforce what I just learned.
NBMEs are the most similar to the CBSE questions. You must do them and review the content. NBME scores are mostly irrelevant as they do not influence when you are going to take the exam (as opposed to a med student who may postpone their STEP based on the NBME score). You should dissect every question on the test instead of looking at your score and ignoring the answers. The score is a distractor and will either make you over or under confident. I liked doing some of them as open book for this reason.
