You can only help yourself. No one can take the test for you. Try to do thousands of practice questions. Usmle world, kaplan, that new nejm knowledge+. read the conrad fisher book before starting your questions. get yourself a white board and draw things out. and make notes of stuff you get wrong. you should know what the answer is after reading the question and then you'll see it in the choices. For half the questions on the real exam you'll be guessing between two answer choices. if you are able to answer half the blocks with decent confidence and then guess between two or three answer choices on the other half, you're doing pretty damn good and that's when you should take the test.
When you're practicing the questions, if you don't know with certainty, flag it, and then learn how you guessed right or why it was wrong.
for CCS, get yourself a system going as if it were a real patient being worked up over a period of a couple weeks unless it's an emergency case, but you need to have your order commands memorized or you won't know what to type in and the clock will run on you.
the only test taking tricks I can tell you are to skip the drug ads and research study questions and any other question that's more than 20 lines long. spend no more than a second scrolling down and click a random answer and then go back to it if you have more time. they will eat up your time and supposedly each question is worth the same (I don't know if I believe that though). The drug ads are actually very very easy but you should only invest time reading them if you really have the time, or you're going to end up with 5 unseen questions on each block and you will be toast.
