Psych Shelf Exam

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Books Preferred for Psych Shelf Exam

  • BRS

    Votes: 2 3.2%

  • Blueprints

    Votes: 15 23.8%

  • Appleton and Lange

    Votes: 16 25.4%

  • Boards and Wards

    Votes: 4 6.3%

  • PreTest

    Votes: 14 22.2%

  • NMS

    Votes: 6 9.5%

  • High Yield

    Votes: 6 9.5%
  • Total voters
    63
  • Poll closed .
-Just wondering if its worth going over all of the major theories in development like Erickson Piaget Freud etc. It was briefly mentioned in Lange but we had a lecture on it in school. Not sure if its worth my time memorizing all that..

-Also, to what degree is childhood development tested? Basic knowledge? Or should I know it like I did for my peds shelf?

Thanks for the help
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sswang00 said:
-Just wondering if its worth going over all of the major theories in development like Erickson Piaget Freud etc. It was briefly mentioned in Lange but we had a lecture on it in school. Not sure if its worth my time memorizing all that..

-Also, to what degree is childhood development tested? Basic knowledge? Or should I know it like I did for my peds shelf?

Thanks for the help
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History and theories are not tested at all. don't waste your time.

you'll maybe get one or two questions about childhood development but it will mostly be like step 1 where you'll need to identify whether the developmental stage is normal or abnormal. haven't taken peds so can't compare.
 
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Are there any specific medicine topics worth reviewing for the psych shelf, or is most of the medicine stuff about medical diseases that must be ruled out before a psych illness?
 
SB100 said:
Are there any specific medicine topics worth reviewing for the psych shelf, or is most of the medicine stuff about medical diseases that must be ruled out before a psych illness?
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there may be a question or two on neuro topics that are closely related to psych, particularly the different types of dementias.
 
anybody have any opinion on first aid 3rd ed vs 2nd ed? 3rd ed came out this past may, but is it worth the upgrade??
 
Can anyone comment on whether or not sleep disorder questions are tested on the shelf?
 
whiteorgo said:
anybody have any opinion on first aid 3rd ed vs 2nd ed? 3rd ed came out this past may, but is it worth the upgrade??
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I got in the 95 percentile with the 2nd edition, so it is possible. :p
 
Just my take on the shelf, I used:

First Aid for Psych
Pre-Test Psychiatry
Lange Q&A Psychiatry
UWorld Psychiatry

For Pre-Test and Lange I ignored the questions about developmental stages and therapy types and psychologic theories and just did the "Psychiatry" oriented questions.

I scored 99 with 98th percentile.
 
Sorry to rehash this, but are people generally using the 2nd or 3rd edition of FA for psych?? Need to know before I pony up the dough for newest edition...
 
My two cents:

Scaled score 91

All I did was rely on my Step 1 knowledge, read case files one time with special focus on the pharmacology, went through the Kaplan psych note and videos on time, did USMLERx, Kaplan QBank, Pretest, and UWorld.

Of course, UWorld helped the most, but bits of the other qbanks also helped (more questions = more vignette scenarios to get familiar with)

The only questions that seemed to throw me off entirely were some of the child psych questions.
 
Scaled score 97

Uworld
Case files
2/3 of pre-test
2 read throughs of first aid for step 2 psych section

All in all I don't feel like I prepared that much compared to other peers and my test was a lot of common sense type stuff. Easiest shelf by far however. If you aren't confident in your test taking I could see how someone might see this shelf as more difficult
 
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87

Case files, uworld, some of pretest - these are plenty. I would even drop pretest.

Test was certainly more difficult than I expected. This was my first rotation - having other rotations such as medicine may have made it more straight forward since I had a few medicine related questions that my step 1 knowledge helped me through.
 
it seems that the lang q and answer book seems to have some hard questions....many statistics and things not found in first aid. Is this representative of the shelf exam?
 
I ended up 90+

casefiles
FA for psych
lange q&a
uworld questions

thought I did pretty poorly originally but ended up fine.
 
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What kind of questions are asked?
Should I be paying attention to epidemiology?

Are they going to through questions where a dx requires 6 symptoms but the stem only describes 5 to throw you off?
 
Why are some people recommending A&L and others recommending Lange Q&A? Are they the same? As far as I can tell (from amazon) A&L was the original book (first few editions), but now Lange Q&A 10th ed. is the most recent version.
 
How did you guys find out what percentile your scaled score corresponds with? I only saw the scaled score on the nbme report which gives the avg scaled score of 70 and SD... can I use that to figure out my percentile?
 
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What is this crap?? I'm doing UWorld Psych questions and I have 85% right and that corresponds to 55th percentile. WTF
 
DartmouthMS1 said:
What is this crap?? I'm doing UWorld Psych questions and I have 85% right and that corresponds to 55th percentile. WTF
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I think they're just particularly easy. I got 95% right and am at 88th percentile.

Took the shelf on Friday. Prep was Andreasen & Black's Introductory Textbook of Psychiatry x1, First Aid for Psychiatry x2ish, Lange Q&A x2, UWorld Psych questions x1. Didn't do much reading on my patients (how many times can you read about depression...)

Shelf seemed pretty manageable and straightforward. Meds/next step questions were very easy. The diagnosis questions were a little trickier where the timeframe of med changes/symptoms/life events was very important in determining MDD vs. adjustment disorder vs. mood disorder secondary to substance/GMC. I could narrow down every question to two answers pretty much.

Lange and UWorld are great, especially for comparing and contrasting diagnoses (which is what this shelf is all about).
 
exeunt said:
How did you guys find out what percentile your scaled score corresponds with? I only saw the scaled score on the nbme report which gives the avg scaled score of 70 and SD... can I use that to figure out my percentile?
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According to how my school calculated my percentile, no.
 
Anyone know if detailed psychotherapies (like the psychotherapy chapter in Lange Q&A), ethics/legal issues, and psychological theories are heavily tested?
 
If you had 2 days to study for the psych shelf what would you recommend to do?

Thanks
 
Got a raw of 87, no idea what percentage that correlates with. All I used was FA for psych and a few papers that my attendings gave me to read.

Not hard, and I am not a fan of psychiatry (surgery is the dream) so just know FA inside and out and the how differentiate various types of delusions and what kind of disorders the are commonly found with and you should be ok. There are always confounders that you will have to take a wild guess at because NBME is a bunch of turds.

Dont waste your time with the freudian psychology crap. I think I had one question and it was easy.
 
bacotell said:
Got a raw of 87, no idea what percentage that correlates with. All I used was FA for psych and a few papers that my attendings gave me to read.

Not hard, and I am not a fan of psychiatry (surgery is the dream) so just know FA inside and out and the how differentiate various types of delusions and what kind of disorders the are commonly found with and you should be ok. There are always confounders that you will have to take a wild guess at because NBME is a bunch of turds.

Dont waste your time with the freudian psychology crap. I think I had one question and it was easy.
Click to expand...

Pretty much agree with above... I used FA for Psych and the UWorld Psych questions and scored in 99th %ile. The only thing that FA didn't cover that seemed disproportionately represented on my shelf were questions about kids with genetic syndromes (surprising amount of Step 1-type questions about specific genes or names of syndromes). Threw me off a little, but I guess it didn't affect me much when all was said and done.
 
MDPhDeac said:
Pretty much agree with above... I used FA for Psych and the UWorld Psych questions and scored in 99th %ile. The only thing that FA didn't cover that seemed disproportionately represented on my shelf were questions about kids with genetic syndromes (surprising amount of Step 1-type questions about specific genes or names of syndromes). Threw me off a little, but I guess it didn't affect me much when all was said and done.
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How many times did you go through FA/UWorld?
 
Hey, just booked my SHELF for DEC 13th... Should I do questions 2 weeks before and just read FA/Kaplan/Casefiles before hand? Is Uworld better than KaplanQbank??
TY
 
Took the exam, I felt like every other question was trying to differentiate between Adjustment Disorder, MDD and Pseuodementia. Has a few child psych questions, sleep questions, decent amount of pharm - some SE questions and some what would you give them ones. Passages were annoyingly long in my opinion but you had to read them to see which criteria's the patient had or not. Definitely not a bad exam, I did FAx2, Uworld, Lange, half of casefiles and the new NMBE questions they just put out.
 
I got a raw score of 81 and my percentile was 57% ... does that seem odd?? I know the psyc shelf has a steep curve ... but 81 corresponding to 57%???
 
Just wrote the exam.. found that the questions had tons of step 1 material on them including karyotypes for PDD etc.. lots of therapy/pharmtherapy questions, lots of delerium and bzd or alc withdrawal. Not a whole lot of personality disorders or defense mechanisms. Was a fair exam i thought.. I did Uworld, Kaplan Q bank, FA X2, kaplan vids, lange Q n A questions, FA Psych questions. Stems were longer than I expected but I finished the exam with 30 mins left for review. Good luck to anyone who is writing soon.
 
kuhlguy said:
I got a raw score of 81 and my percentile was 57% ... does that seem odd?? I know the psyc shelf has a steep curve ... but 81 corresponding to 57%???
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Yeah, I don't understand how the psych shelf is curved. They say the national average is 70 with a SD of 8, but I was told that the 50th percentile is a score of 80. It's odd, to say the least.
 
Mass Effect said:
Yeah, I don't understand how the psych shelf is curved. They say the national average is 70 with a SD of 8, but I was told that the 50th percentile is a score of 80. It's odd, to say the least.
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Yes the average ~80 is correct. The 70 with SD of 8 is never accurate. That's written on every shelf exam and is based on the original performance in the 1990s. I don't know why they still have that on our score reports because NBME actually sends out new mean percentile scores every quarter of the year based on that quarter's performance. I know this because my school printed the 2010-2011 scale conversion sheet into our syllabus.

I also took the test today and pretty much felt exactly the same as the guy above who just posted about his test.
 
got an raw 82 score with the avg. 70 and SD of 8 .. 1.5 SD above the mean isnt bad but I expected to do better after killing the Uworld and Kaplan Qbanks with 90% and 80% respectively. Meh.. at least its one SHELF down
 
USMLE12DOC said:
got an raw 82 score with the avg. 70 and SD of 8 .. 1.5 SD above the mean isnt bad but I expected to do better after killing the Uworld and Kaplan Qbanks with 90% and 80% respectively. Meh.. at least its one SHELF down
Click to expand...

Read the above posts. We're not sure 70 is the average, apparently.
 
gravitywave said:
yep. pretty sure it's high 70's
Click to expand...

:eek:

The average only increases as you take it later in the year, so does this shelf's average actually go >80 towards the end? I guess that's in line with the UWorld average but that's still shocking

I'm glad I had this rotation early on, but I wish I had pediatrics before it because there were straight up pediatric questions on there that were very remotely at best tied to psychiatry
 
Does anyone have experience with using Blueprints Q&A Step 2 Psychiatry to study for the psych shelf? Was it useful? I have Lange Q&A Psychiatry and First Aid for the Psychiatry Clerskhip, + USMLEWorld. Is this good enough, or should I add Blueprints +/- Blueprints Q&A?

Thanks.
 
netminder said:
Does anyone have experience with using Blueprints Q&A Step 2 Psychiatry to study for the psych shelf? Was it useful? I have Lange Q&A Psychiatry and First Aid for the Psychiatry Clerskhip, + USMLEWorld. Is this good enough, or should I add Blueprints +/- Blueprints Q&A?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Those are more than enough for the psych shelf. Just got my score back. I did FA Psych x 2, Lange Q&A x 1, and UW, and I got 94 raw/94%.

For Lange Q&A, skip the chapters about psychotherapy. Waste of time.
 
Wow -- this is a huge help. Thanks, ilovewater. Congrats on the great score.
 
hey guys in lange q and a, should I do the chapter on ethical and legal issues? Does the shelf have questions on ethics and legal issues? Thanks.
 
BlueElmo said:
hey guys in lange q and a, should I do the chapter on ethical and legal issues? Does the shelf have questions on ethics and legal issues? Thanks.
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Meh, the chapter wasn't too helpful. I would just do all the other chapters first, and if you have time, go back to that chapter.

There was also more medicine and peds than I expected on the exam.... The peds questions threw me off because I haven't had peds. However, if you've done both, they're probably not too bad.
 
For those of you who did the NBME exams for the psych clerkship, how helpful did you find them? I crushed one, and then did not much better than average on the second. I wonder how reliable these are. Or is this just another example of how totally random this whole process is? Thanks.
 
netminder said:
For those of you who did the NBME exams for the psych clerkship, how helpful did you find them? I crushed one, and then did not much better than average on the second. I wonder how reliable these are. Or is this just another example of how totally random this whole process is? Thanks.
Click to expand...

I forgot that I did those exams too the day before the shelf because I was freaking out. One of them (#2 I think) kicked my butt. The other one I did really well on. The questions on the shelf are really similar to the ones in the practice exams.
 
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