Hey all. I feel the urge to contribute after following these types of threads for over a year now. I’m indebted to many of you that went before and posted valuable tips for prep and test day. Hopefully a post from a normal student like me will help out a struggling normal student somewhere.
I took the beast yesterday. Felt brutal, but I’m trying to trust my NBME scores and just hold off judgment til the real score arrives. I did well but not spectacular in my first 2 years, always above class average on exams. I used Rx, first aid, and pathoma alongside coursework.
I go to a west coast MD school, had about 6 weeks of dedicated prep time. I did great on the shelf exams and finals for my school, had improved on Rx recently, and was generally feeling like a baller so I went into my dedicated time with a lofty goal of 250. I blew through DIT in 8 days and took a baseline NBME, expecting 230 or so (lethal combination of ignorance and arrogance). When my score on NBME 6 came back at 196 at 5 weeks out I had a genuine freakout day. Low point for sure. I felt like I had followed the “formula” outlined on SDN and that would simply pave the way to 260+. I suppose that’s the danger of SDN.
I pressed on, sticking to a strict schedule of uworld and first aid that roughly resembled the taus method. Barely touched any other resource. My goal was to memorize first aid and do all of uworld, then go back through my incorrects and see where that takes me. I often see people on here saying they know first aid. That book is dense; it is one thing to feel like you know first aid, but it’s an entirely different thing to really KNOW first aid, front to back, every fact. One can easily spend 6 full weeks only in first aid and still learn new things until the final day. First aid (and uworld) seemed the highest yield to me, so why not learn them absolutely cold before moving on to something else? I would do a few random timed blocks of uworld in the morning and review/annotate, then spend the rest of the day reading first aid, starting with my weakest subjects. I did this 6 days a week + an NBME on the 7th most weeks. I found it helpful to have very specific daily and weekly goals for number of uworld questions and FA pages, which kept me accountable and helped me stay diligent in the evening when I was tired. I wrote down everything I didn’t know from FA and UW, and on weekends reviewed my “did not know” note sheets for that week repeatedly (I heard about this method from various people online and otherwise). This helped me hammer down the weaker points as well as made the subsequent FA passes more efficient, as I already knew which sections/pages I struggled with and which ones I had down. Score breakdown:
NBME 6 – 196 (5 wks out)
NBME 11 – 209 (4 wks)
NBME 12 – 220 (3 wks)
Skipped a week
NBME 15 – 241 (10 days)
NBME 13 – 256 (4 days)
NBME 16 – 251 (2 days)
I was pleasantly surprised with the progress. I really struggled to stay motivated after seeing that 256, but tried my hardest to press on. I worked like a banshee those first 4 weeks and thought burnout would never happen to me, but at 5 weeks I was so ready to be done. Took the free 150 the day before the test and scored 93%ish. Finished uworld with a 70% average, though I didn’t put much stock into this and treated it purely as a learning tool (was getting around 80% by the end, then like 95% on my 2nd pass through incorrects). By the end I was reading over 100 pgs of FA a day, so I’d estimate I went through it all about 4-5 times with each one becoming quicker than the last as I skipped pages I felt I had mastered. Unlike some others I found reading FA an active and very engaging exercise. I know. I’m disgusted by that, too.
The test felt much tougher than the free 150 and NBMEs, and probably on par with uworld. Less gimmies than expected. A few questions out of left field (anatomy) but most everything was in FA. Some were classic concepts tested in new and strange ways. A few exact replicas from NBMEs and the free 150. Doing so many questions (Rx, UW, NBMEs) benefited me by saving time in the test; for example, a girl with tourette’s and galactorrhea immediately makes me think side effect of a typical antipsychotic (this was NOT on my exam, just an example). If I was seeing this for the first time I might be able to figure it out but it would take a minute. If you do enough questions and get a feel for what’s asked, your ears will perk up when you hear associations like tourette’s and galactorrhea, especially (at least for me) if you got that wrong initially, as wrong answers tend to stick.
