NBME Comprehensive Sci Exam

[Radiohead]

I know somewhere this has been already asked, but for those too lazy to search (like myself) I will ask anyway. So, for those of you who have had the pleasure of taking the comprehensive basic sci exam...how did your score correlate with the real thing??? I somehow scored an 83 which corresponds to a 233 step I score. I did no studying whatsoever and I felt like I had to guess ALOT. For some background, I have done very well in my 1/2 yr classes and usually score very high on the "shelf" tests (i.e. 88-90). Does that mean I can get a similar score on step I w/o doing anything (like that'll happen), or was that just blind luck. Thanks for any help.

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[Stinger86]

I made a 74 on the comp sci exam, and that was without purposefully studying for it, and before having reached several high yield topics in my courses (for some reason, my school had the bright idea of making us take it halfway through the semester). I didn't think it was too hard, and I know I made a lot of dumb mistakes. But as for whether it correlates with a high score on the usmle, for some reason I doubt it. As tempting as it sounds to not study for the usmle because you aced a "diagnostic" exam, I think that's a very risky idea, especially considering you seemed to guess a lot. The actual exam is probably going to be a lot more difficult. Man, as comfortable as I feel about doing well on the upcoming Step, I'm sure as hell still going to study for it. Not studying and not doing well would only leave me with the thoughts "now what would've happen if I studied?"

Remember that if you pass, you won't get to take it again, even with a low pass score. Study up and make it count.

 

[Solace]

Is the NBME Comp Sci exam same as the NMBE self-assessment exam? If not, where can I take this exam?

 

[Radiohead]

The Basic Science Comprehensive exam should be administered by your medical school. The self-assessment is something you can buy from the NBME website, and is different from the former.

As for not studying for the real thing, that would be a crazy idea.

 

[adamant]

We took it last week and I also got an 83 scaled to 233. I was pretty happy since I haven't really started studying for the step yet. We'll see how well it correlates. The thing I didn't understand is that it said in the analysis section that the step 1 correlation was done based on a mean of 200 from 1991??
The mean for step 1 last year was around 216. Should we add those 16 points to our estimated score or what??