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Check yer PM!I am interested in GT but don't want to commit until I try it out. does anyone have a one month free trial? I greatly greatly appreciate it!
I am interested in GT but don't want to commit until I try it out. does anyone have a one month free trial? I greatly greatly appreciate it!
im at 28% and im supposed to do 250 questions today...that's not gonna happen lol. ill probably just go through and mark them all as 2 or 3 without looking at them, and thereby delay them until the weekend...
There is a button under your schedule that you can use to "clear today's review." it lets you spread the questions out over the next few weeks instead of having to deal with bringing up the low score average and getting the questions more frequently than you want to. (can you tell I've used this option too much?)
Okay, I gotta say that I'm not a big fan of GT right now as an MS1.
I'm trying to add/bank cards from my current course, but it just feels like I'm learning random factoids without any context. I just finished anatomy and embryology, and it seems a little bit more helpful for learning those courses that you already finished. Mainly it's because the information can be organized in your brain better.
So, in my opinion, GT is useful when you actually FINISHED the course. It's not an efficient learning method WHILE you are taking the course, even if you are banking questions from material you learned from class last week. For instance, GT is pretty useful for mastering the embryo material I learned from last block, but it's not helpful in remembering the kreb cycle that I just learned last week.
I'm going to let my free subscription expire and maybe start again in January. For now, I think I will stick to annotating FA as we go along in class and reviewing old material from FA as we go along. I feel that's a little bit more efficient than using GT for now.
Not to hate on GT, but it seems like school keeps everyone busy enough.
Annotating FA seems like the best thing to do, then you can review randomly at your own pace. GT is a good idea but bad in execution.
In reality, I can learn biochem really well this semester, so well that when I review it, it can come back fairly quickly.
The problem with GT is you try to keep that knowledge base for 2 full years, which really doesn't seem necessary. You can gear up for Step 1, everyone has been doing it for years and scoring 230/240+. I guess if you need that 250/260+ then you may need something more dramatic but most won't. I feel like the maintenance of the material is costing people A LOT, the theme has come up repeatedly on this thread. People just don't have the time to do it all.
It appears the best strategy for medical school is to learn the why's and the how's of the material while you go through it (deep learning), then to occassionally review (ends of semesters/summer/blocks). Trying to review all the medical school subjects everyday seems like an exercise in frustration.
BUT what do I know? Just one man's opinion. Obivously during 2nd year, this would be much more helpful but for M1s, which is really what my post is targeted towards, this doesn't seem useful. M2s definitely need to review during the ~12 or ~6 months before the exam (again, depending on your ambitions).
Have you used GT before? I think the concept is really really good, but I got disappointed after I bought it. I was hoping GT can have the same amount of information from school, but it turned out to have maybe only 1/20 amount information of what we learned in school.... GT please add in more information, I hope you add in the whole first aid if you can.
Why choose Flash Facts for the USMLE Step 1?
Over 10,000 flash cards integrated with First Aid for the USMLE Step 1
Drill yourself on the key First Aid facts
Searchable by organ system, discipline, and topic
Discuss, annotate, and mark your favorite First Aid topics
First Aid topics constantly updated with corrections and bonus content
Thanks!
It is really hard to keep up even now, but it is also very exciting and encouraging to see just how much I've learned...and it is really great to have a goal to work towards. For instance, my M1 class has been through 18% of the lectures and testing that we will go through before taking Step 1, but we've learned so much material that I have banked 29% of the GT flashcards and mastered 14%. If I am able to keep up with GT (and that is a big if!), I will have covered most of the material well in advance of even starting my dedicated Step 1 study time and mastered most of it during the beginning of my Step 1 study time.
So, I hope to be able to keep it up. It is taking a lot of discipline, though
On the plus side, GT has shown me that I had already started to forget the details of what I learned in the first month of school and it refreshed all the stuff in my head and it will hopefully stick even more permanently now. I probably never would have spent valuable time reviewing material from the first month of school and realized how much I had already forgotten if it weren't for GT...but the time IS valuable, and my grades have dipped a little because of spending it that way...
Not to hate on GT, but it seems like school keeps everyone busy enough.
Annotating FA seems like the best thing to do, then you can review randomly at your own pace. GT is a good idea but bad in execution.
In reality, I can learn biochem really well this semester, so well that when I review it, it can come back fairly quickly.
The problem with GT is you try to keep that knowledge base for 2 full years, which really doesn't seem necessary. You can gear up for Step 1, everyone has been doing it for years and scoring 230/240+. I guess if you need that 250/260+ then you may need something more dramatic but most won't. I feel like the maintenance of the material is costing people A LOT, the theme has come up repeatedly on this thread. People just don't have the time to do it all.
It appears the best strategy for medical school is to learn the why's and the how's of the material while you go through it (deep learning), then to occassionally review (ends of semesters/summer/blocks). Trying to review all the medical school subjects everyday seems like an exercise in frustration.
BUT what do I know? Just one man's opinion. Obivously during 2nd year, this would be much more helpful but for M1s, which is really what my post is targeted towards, this doesn't seem useful. M2s definitely need to review during the ~12 or ~6 months before the exam (again, depending on your ambitions).
You know, it's not even the amount of time GT requires. That is at least my experience with GT. Right now, I have a lot of free time. I just think GT is inefficient to keep up with material. I'd rather annotate and read through the small sections in FA than do these flashcards.
You could just get flash facts if you really wanted everything:
http://www.usmlerx.com/Fredv2/User/flashfacts.aspx
I've never used, but it's by the publishers of FA. No flashcards have 19/20 or 20/20 what you learn in med school.
I'm at 34% of the material and am worried I won't be able to keep up with the questions when I get past 50-60%. Stupid school is too demanding right now. Anyone have experience with this? Maybe switch to light mode?
Just check your PM.So.. how does one get a trial of this beast?
I do find that doing a run-through of GT on at least 1 weekend for each systems course seems to help my grade a lot (n=1 as per the SDN tradition). It's keeping up with review questions that is really difficult for me. I'm thinking about doing a bimonthly crazy day of just GT review questions through the end of the semester. I know it's not what the program is designed for, but I think it's all the time I can dedicate right now.
Doing a class lecture/ppt and then doing the 1-2 cards that go along with is a great way to summarize that topic and extract the board material. Also, it helps you see the unbelievable amount of fat in most of your lectures. Too bad all that fat is on school exams.http://www.gunnertraining.com/free_trial/1082386
It does help with recall but it doesn't explain. This is best used as a high-yield review after reading RR Goljian or your textbook to understand the topic first. GT will be much more effective this way.
I still like it - i find it is constantly adding new material which does inc. the amount but I figure it is better to have lots of info that i can pick and choose from vs. having too little info where I feel im being cheated.
To other posts about having too many questions, the number of questions definitely dec. as you master the material- i have about 65% banked and 49% mastery (started MS1 and did a lot over the summer) and have approx. 70-100 questions/day depending on how many cards I added the previous weekend. So the amount of questions depends more on what your ratio of completed:mastery then just your % completed.
As others have stated this really isn't a great tool for learning things the first time through, i tried it with mild success over the summer - using Robbins and wiki make sense of the cards. It goes MUCH faster if my classes have covered it and I've studied it before.
Is anyone disappointed in the accuracy of alot of the content? I see errors daily. Sometimes they are small miswordings giving the wrong impression, but sometimes they are just plain wrong. I've also encountered a factoid on a card that was verbatim from wikipedia.
Is anyone disappointed in the accuracy of alot of the content? I see errors daily. Sometimes they are small miswordings giving the wrong impression, but sometimes they are just plain wrong. I've also encountered a factoid on a card that was verbatim from wikipedia.
hmmmm.... care to cite any examples? i mean glaring ones, not the silly little things that constitute 80% of the "errata" people submit for FA. i've found occasional errors and they get fixed very quickly via the feedback link. given that the vast majority of the material lines up perfectly with other board review resources, i'm not sure what you're getting at. to say that you're seeing significant errors "daily" is probably overstating the case.
just because something came verbatim out of Wikipedia doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means that GT is assembling all the high-yield data it can find. There are, for example, a lot of factoids in there that I've only seen in Big Robbins otherwise.
I've also submitted quite a few feedback requests for errors I've found. They fixed the first 4-5, but haven't responded in the past month! Not sure what is going on.
I've found that they are most responsive when you include your source for why you think their material is wrong. Have you tried going back and doing that?
their card for PCOS (I think under non-neoplastic ovarian disorders) was flat out wrong up until a few days ago. they made up some mechanism about how high estradiol causes increased LH while simultaneously causing low FSH (wrong wrong wrong). they didn't even mention anything about insulin resistance in PCOS either. to be fair, within a day of contacting them about it, they fixed it.
I probably submit feedback to them on 1-2/10 or so cards. most of the time it's very little stuff (like saying goblet cells in Barrett's esophagus = stomach metaplasia rather than intestinal metaplasia). i'm not complaining - if I read something on GT that i have never heard before, I go look it up on Up To Date. if GT is wrong I just submit the feedback and they fix it. so despite the errors I'm finding it really useful for studying
Yes, I've quoted textbooks and provided page numbers and sources--still a few haven't been changed. Not sure, maybe they dispute the information, but either way, it'd be nice to hear back.
Ultimately, I would like GT to start using prompts that are worded differently, i.e. to try to elicit your memory fountain when you see that key word. What I mean is that sometimes you get too much into pattern recognition (like the shape and rhythm of the prompts), but you actually don't really know the material well enough to recognize it in a question...make sense? This could be rectified by asking the same concept with differently worded questions to really round out your knowledge. I work around it by trying to talk to myself about secondary and tertiary information related to the card when I am going through my daily assigned cards (e.g. if if a card asks me to just list the action of the subscapularis, I go ahead and list the actions of all of the rotator cuff muscles).
GT has always been responsive to my editorial suggestions. I reckon I have submitted about 10 changes.
Although there have been some glaring errors, most of my suggestions have been to include high yield information that was lacking, e.g. they had a card on SMP-TMX that left out Pneumocystis as an indication...while the card was technically correct for the other indications, it needed that extra oomph.
My biggest beef is not with errata, but when there are two similar cards, but one card has more information than the other.
Ultimately, I would like GT to start using prompts that are worded differently, i.e. to try to elicit your memory fountain when you see that key word. What I mean is that sometimes you get too much into pattern recognition (like the shape and rhythm of the prompts), but you actually don't really know the material well enough to recognize it in a question...make sense? This could be rectified by asking the same concept with differently worded questions to really round out your knowledge. I work around it by trying to talk to myself about secondary and tertiary information related to the card when I am going through my daily assigned cards (e.g. if if a card asks me to just list the action of the subscapularis, I go ahead and list the actions of all of the rotator cuff muscles).
Either way, I started another question bank and I would say that 50% of the questions I get correct are due to GT and the other 50% are from something I learned in class. Not bad considering GT takes up about 20% of my total study time. When you have listed the 7 symptoms of some disease 20 times, those symptoms stand out in the stem of a question like a sore thumb. And that is...pure win.
that is an excellent point which I have thought about and agree.
ok, that's cool. i've found some lousy errors too, but not many - which is why i tend to study with a book when i'm banking cards for the first time. i haven't gotten to that card yet, but to be fair: that estradiol - LH - FSH mechanism is cited in Goljan as one of the factors that keep the hormonal imbalance going. it wouldn't be fair to call it the primary disturbance though...
anyway, i guess i have you to thank for fixing that card, and others... i'll continue to do the same.