Usmle Step 2

[Swaydaa]

Hey guys just took step 2 today. I hope this is legal?? I scored a 230 on Step 1 and I thought it was a little tougher. You will probably hear many more people say it was easier, so take my statement with a grain of salt!

1. I had no less than 20 questions (yes 20) on amenorrhea (all types), womans fertility, and womens endocrine......CANT STAND THAT CRAP!! What sucked the most is they ALL stated...the mans sperm count was good....I was waiting for one of those. Had many OB questions (35-40) I was pleased at that...I like OB

2. I had about 10 questions on congenital heart defects...know the blood gases and symptoms that go with each (I hate that crap). One associated with an XRAY. They don't give the "classical" buzzwords.

3. I finished my last 5 days of studying with surgery.....cant even recall 2-3 freakin pure surgery questions....what a total waste time (in my opinion).

4. about 40-50 questions concerning what test you would do next.

5. I consider myself pretty darn good at reading EKG's and recognizing dysrythmias....NOT A Single rhythm strip or EKG....damn. I did have a question that stated the patient had peaked T-waves.

6. I had exactly 5 questions on epi/stats. sensitivity, PPV, NPV, power....ONE asking about relative risk. Do a quick run through on doing the math for these things...I thought I was good, but I proved to be a little rusty (spent 4-5 minutes on one question trying to figure out where to put the numbers).

7. Had a good number of trauma questions...definatley worth a little extra time.

8. I was lucky mine did not have a bunch of DERM...I was scoring mid to low 60's on Q-bank for DERM. As a whole, I thought the Q-bank was good/OK for step 2. It was nowhere close to being as detailed as the actual test....but It does cover all the topics. MKASP was pretty darn good I must say.....real close to the actual IM questions!!

9. I hear the test bank has over 10,000 questions. I only had 376 questions, so everyones test may be totally different.

10. The test was freakin looooooooooooong as hell. 9 HOURS. the last block and half I was shot. My eyes were the only thing holding me to the computor...the rest of my body was FALLING AWAYYYYYYYYYYy. Get some good rest. Lot tougher than step 1 concerning getting through and reading the page long question with labs.

11. About 4 to 5 questions on acid base with the actual blood gas in the question...pure respiratory, compensated, etc.

12. OB/GYN blueprints in my opinion is the absolute gold standard for USMLE step 2. Best of the bluprints series. Pediactric blueprints follows OB at a close second. I thought internal medicine blueprints stunk like Sh-t for the exam. I wil post my results when I receive them and then offer my study plan if it worked???


Thanks for listening...just had to get it off my back. GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE. I hope you do well.

Anyone ELSE please feel free to add your experience!!!!

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[jayhawk]

smellycat-

i was trying to check the nbme website too for step 2 and got all the way to the credit card screen (i'm freaking out in the process) so on a whim i decided to try and apply for step 1 (since i knew i'd passed it) and the EXACT same thing happened. you must have to try and actually pay for it to see if you've passed. anyone else know how this "trick" plays out?

 

[smellycat]

I was also reading on some old posts that other people were freaked out about not passing because they were able to do the whole process, but they ended up passing...
I'm not sure how "reassuring" this "trick" is.

 

[GrandMasterB]

my test: ob, rheum, surgery (not just trauma), psych, endo (not in that order)my stupid girlfriend told me not to study endo and rheum- arrgh!

 

[Swaydaa]

my test: ob, rheum, surgery (not just trauma), psych, endo (not in that order)

thanks Gmaster!

There was a post on another thread about fetal heart tracings....I wanted to post it here because It jogged my memory. I do remember having 2 fetal heart tracings. One was an early Decel and another was late decel.....make sure you know what the tracings look like and what they are asociated with.....you will probably have at least one of these tracings.

 

[smellycat]

well it looks like my scores were sent out...sigh...hope i did well :|
i tried that thing again and it let me go all the way to the credit card...so i stopped
tried it for step 1 which i passed and it did the same thing... so i guess the "trick" doesn't work for me...
signing up for the stupid cs now. wish me luck!

 

[undecided05]

smellycat... your school can check your scores online for you. they get released every Wednesday to your education office via internet and then sent out snail mail.

 

[smellycat]

thanks undecided...i will give them a call

 

[kdoc2005]

I took Step 2 yesterday. I thought it was easier than Step 1 in that there were more questions that I felt confident I had right. There were still MANY I did not know, however. It was heavily weighted in the following specialties:

Ob Gyn (TONS of it, like every third question)
Neuro (where's the lesion; which blood vessel blocked)
Trauma (lots of aortic dissection)
Peds
Rheum
Derm

There were fewer good 'ol internal medicine questions than I expected. I had two EKGs, one CXR, several pictures of skin lesions and one path slide (it was skin, but I have no idea what the pathology was). The statistics were very straight forward: sensitivity, PPV, and bias.

Good luck to all who are still studying!!

kdoc2005

 

[Jaluv]

I just took Step 2 on Thursday - I also had very heavy OB/Gyn and Neuro - and although I didn't have the same feeling of doom and gloom as when I walked out of Step 1 last year, there were still LOTS of questions that I didn't feel confident about my answer choice (always down to 2 answers and then it feels like you could go either way). What really killed me was the length - there were times during the exam when I would actually catch myself drifting away (meanwhile the timer is tick, tick, ticking away), and by the end of the last block I just wanted to get outta there, no matter what. Well I'm thankful that's over, now I just have to deal with that annoying (not to mention costly) Step II CS. Speaking of being costly, if that Step IICS isn't a classic hustle, then I don't know what is!

 

[caedmon]

Just took step two yesterday.

That is one long test! Armed with plenty of coffee, I still found myself drifting toward the end of some sections. I thought the test was fair overall, I felt like I new for sure about 60%, almost certain 20&, educated guessed, 10-15%, and 5-10% were out there. I had a much better feeling after step 2 than step 1. I used Secrets, Advanced Life Support for Step 2, and some other books only for reference when those were too brief. I felt like Qbank was my most valuable tool for prep. We'll find out in a couple of weeks how these things really worked, but I felt like that combo was just right, of course Crush could be substituted for learning style. I started NMS, but some of those questions got ridiculous. On the test there were certainly things that I didn't know, and am not sure where I would have found them. Here's a brief rundown of some of the test.

1. Echo; lots of ob/gyn, esp. abdominal pain during pregnancy, ddx of lower abdominal pain ie. PID, TOA, torsion (three times, I think).
2. Acid/Base/Electrolytes were huge on my test. 3-4 questions on post surg. elec, ie. drains from every orifice, why is bicarb up. lots of ABG interp.
3. Couple of nutrition questions I didn't expect. just looked up one that I guessed right- Papilledema on exam in girl taking lots of supplements, which one caused it. Vit A- pseudotumor cerebri. (y'all probably knew that though). Had one about nutritional requirements of someone with nephropathy.
4. Screening. Pt comes in for routine exam, what screening do you do, when do you start screening etc. Sometimes all the obvious ones weren't there. ie. a couple of times when I was thinking PAP it wasn't available, and I guessed Chlamydia.
5. Of course SOB, Abdominal pain were HUGE!
6. Couple of EKG's ie. 2 pictures of EKG's, and a couple of buzz words like sine wave or inverted T wave.
7. Had several X-rays, chest, fractures, avascular necrosis, and a couple more I can't remember right now.

Not present as much as I thought.
1. Peds milestones guess age (none) was big on qbank
2. rheum- although some gimmies, SLE, and different markers ie. anti-etc,etc
3. Onc

Professions I don't envy after step 2
1. EM
2. Ob/gyn
3. Crit care
4. Peds
5. Family

I thought that questions and answer choices were much more straight forward than qbank, I recommend doing as many as possible, and when you see some weird derm disease or something you've never heard of, and they ask you the mechanism of the disease, don't sweat it too much. Overall a very valuable resource and the presentation, from font to screen colors are EXACTLY like the real thing.

Good luck to everyone taking the test!

Seacrest OUT!!

 

[andwhat]

thats a great great feedback!!! I wish you the best score.. can you please tell me approximately what were youre qbank scores around right before going into the exam.. also did you do any other assessments, like the Kaplan CD, or the released items, or the NBME CCSSA questions? thanks so much!

 

[Jattdoc]

thanks for the feedback...i'm up on monday...i'll do a write up after that...later

 

[jayhawk]

that trick never worked for me either. i got my scores on wednesday though, the deans office wrote me an email with them. got a 238/96! it's nice that all that hard work and actually paying attention on the wards paid off! i guess people might want to know what i studied since that seems to be what people put down when they tell their scores (i don't post that much)

i studied for a total of about 3 weeks and did the following:

read boards and wards twice

secrets twice

first aid once (not really worth it)

did all the nms questions (scored anywhere from 60% to 75% on the tests)-these are hard questions...don't get discouraged

took an nbme self assessment exam (got a 450 i think)--these questions are extremely similar to what is on the test and i know for sure that at least 2 or maybe 3 questions were on my test verbatim.

i did not do qbank-from step 1 studying i thought it was sub-par and too easy compared to the real thing-just my opinion

my step 2 was weird, the majority was psych and neuro, good amount of medicine, peds (esp. peds immunology), and ob-gyn, and a fair amount of immunology. not much surgery, oncology, endocrine, or hematology. questions were mostly of the what is the next best step in management, or what test would be diagnostic, etc. the a-m questions were soooo straightforward and were a nice confidence booster.

i hope this helps future test takers! good luck to all, only 6 and a half months until we match!!!!

take care all,
andrea

 

[mountaindew2006]

hey everyone-


quick question. did any of you all get the boot leg version of the kaplan videos? I have heard now kaplan has updated them so i wonder if there are drastic changes? and/or did you use the blue covered kaplan lecture notes? I was told kaplan updated the lecture notes to orange covered ones. are the changes drastic/important?

i dont have these yet, but saw ads for them and were wondering if they'd be worth it since i could save some $$$$$$$$.

thanks

 

[kdoc2005]

To answer the previous questions about what to study...

I read Boards and Wards twice, Secrets twice, and did the NMS question book. I did some questions on Kaplan Qbank, but thought NMS was harder, so stuck with that as my primary question source. My percentages were around 70-75% in NMS and 85% on Qbank. I studied for about 2 1/2 weeks, 10 hours per day.

On the real exam, the questions were more like NMS than Qbank, (e.g., often second and third order rather than just IDing the diagnosis.) There were a couple topics on the exam that were random zebras that I only learned from reading B&W.

Hope that helps!

kdoc2005

 

[wooo]

bump

 

[Vincristine]

Congrats to everyone who not only passed but seemed to do quite well. Thanks for all the advice!

 

[Blade28]

When are you taking your test? I'm glad I got mine out of the way (along with Step 2 CS)!

 

[Swaydaa]

When are you taking your test? I'm glad I got mine out of the way (along with Step 2 CS)!

Yeah, I just took step 2 CS last week. It's pretty darn easy. No hard cases. straight forward. You start the day with about 30 minutes of orientation then you see 5 patients in a row...everyone stands in front of a door and you go in when prompted. You interview patient, do a FOCUSED exam and leave the room. Then you write your note. After the 5 patients you take a 30 minute lunch break. The facility provided a free lunch. Then you see 4 more patients. Then you get a 15 minute break. Then you see 3 more and your done. It's not like CK where your allowed to leave or study. They lock you in the "test" area all day. Good Luck!!

 

[Blade28]

Yeah, I just took step 2 CS last week. It's pretty darn easy. No hard cases. straight forward. You start the day with about 30 minutes of orientation then you see 5 patients in a row...everyone stands in front of a door and you go in when prompted. You interview patient, do a FOCUSED exam and leave the room. Then you write your note. After the 5 patients you take a 30 minute lunch break. The facility provided a free lunch. Then you see 4 more patients. Then you get a 15 minute break. Then you see 3 more and your done. It's not like CK where your allowed to leave or study. They lock you in the "test" area all day. Good Luck!!

I agree. I also took it recently (June 25th, in LA), and found it remarkably similar to the clinical skills tests that we had here in our med school. Then again, I found out a few months ago that we were actually one of the "pilot" programs that the USMLE was using to test out clinical skills scenarios, so that may have had something to do with it.

 

[phillybabe]

Has anyone had any 'stage this cancer' questions on their exam? I hate that stuff.

 

[ilovemangos]

The facility provided a free lunch.

Ha! "Free" lunch. You get a free meal for only $1000.

 

[Swaydaa]

Ha! "Free" lunch. You get a free meal for only $1000.

Yeah that was pretty stupid of me to say!!

I had no staging of cancer in CK or CS....Thank GOD!

 

[padalap]

hi

hope u r going to score well in step 2 as well. have u done any pretest series or blueprint series for step 2. i am taking step 2. idf u have this material i want to buy it


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Hey guys just took step 2 today. I hope this is legal?? I scored a 230 on Step 1 and I thought it was a little tougher. You will probably hear many more people say it was easier, so take my statement with a grain of salt!

1. I had no less than 20 questions (yes 20) on amenorrhea (all types), womans fertility, and womens endocrine......CANT STAND THAT CRAP!! What sucked the most is they ALL stated...the mans sperm count was good....I was waiting for one of those. Had many OB questions (35-40) I was pleased at that...I like OB

2. I had about 10 questions on congenital heart defects...know the blood gases and symptoms that go with each (I hate that crap). One associated with an XRAY. They don't give the "classical" buzzwords.

3. I finished my last 5 days of studying with surgery.....cant even recall 2-3 freakin pure surgery questions....what a total waste time (in my opinion).

4. about 40-50 questions concerning what test you would do next.

5. I consider myself pretty darn good at reading EKG's and recognizing dysrythmias....NOT A Single rhythm strip or EKG....damn. I did have a question that stated the patient had peaked T-waves.

6. I had exactly 5 questions on epi/stats. sensitivity, PPV, NPV, power....ONE asking about relative risk. Do a quick run through on doing the math for these things...I thought I was good, but I proved to be a little rusty (spent 4-5 minutes on one question trying to figure out where to put the numbers).

7. Had a good number of trauma questions...definatley worth a little extra time.

8. I was lucky mine did not have a bunch of DERM...I was scoring mid to low 60's on Q-bank for DERM. As a whole, I thought the Q-bank was good/OK for step 2. It was nowhere close to being as detailed as the actual test....but It does cover all the topics. MKASP was pretty darn good I must say.....real close to the actual IM questions!!

9. I hear the test bank has over 10,000 questions. I only had 376 questions, so everyones test may be totally different.

10. The test was freakin looooooooooooong as hell. 9 HOURS. the last block and half I was shot. My eyes were the only thing holding me to the computor...the rest of my body was FALLING AWAYYYYYYYYYYy. Get some good rest. Lot tougher than step 1 concerning getting through and reading the page long question with labs.

11. About 4 to 5 questions on acid base with the actual blood gas in the question...pure respiratory, compensated, etc.

12. OB/GYN blueprints in my opinion is the absolute gold standard for USMLE step 2. Best of the bluprints series. Pediactric blueprints follows OB at a close second. I thought internal medicine blueprints stunk like Sh-t for the exam. I wil post my results when I receive them and then offer my study plan if it worked???


Thanks for listening...just had to get it off my back. GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE. I hope you do well.

Anyone ELSE please feel free to add your experience!!!!

 

[Swaydaa]

I have already sold all my items on Amazon. Good luck to you

 

[GrandMasterB]

hey guys, i have been contributing to this post- and put some foci of my step 2 on this thread- and my study plan on the big step 1 thread- so i thought i would share my results 267.

 

[undecided05]

congrats... all I ended up with was 244... Man I feel dumb now

 

[Swaydaa]

hey guys, i have been contributing to this post- and put some foci of my step 2 on this thread- and my study plan on the big step 1 thread- so i thought i would share my results (please don't flame me)- 267.

CAN you say....PICK YOUR residency? Sweet. Nice Job. The applicants to this years match who are scoring above 240 (in my field) are getting all the early interview choices at this point.

 

[puffy1]

I posted what I studied and how I approached step 2, and I wanted to update y'all on the proceedings. I did better than I did on Step 1 by 17 points! I'm happy/relieved that I approached things the way they did...now I won't have those 368 or however many questions there are hanging over my head. Now I can stress out over residency applications, interviews and whether or not I'll get to do what I want to do.

strong work grandmasterb.

 

[caedmon]

Got'em from my deans office-249!
I posted what I studied earlier but a brief review:
Secrets 1 and 1/2 times
Advanced life support for step 2 twice
Qbank did about 60% of questions scoring about 75-80% (did all OB/GYN thank goodness)
First Aid for derm pics and Tx but not much else- too detailed in my opinion

good luck to all

 

[Swaydaa]

Got'em from my deans office-249!
I posted what I studied earlier but a brief review:
Secrets 1 and 1/2 times
Advanced life support for step 2 twice
Qbank did about 60% of questions scoring about 75-80% (did all OB/GYN thank goodness)
First Aid for derm pics and Tx but not much else- too detailed in my opinion

good luck to all

Awesome score caedmon...looking good for the match. Good luck

 

[joaquin13]

wow the last few posts have been in the high 240s-250s. I just got mine back, a 217, and I feel like its the worst score ever now after seeing all of these scores!!!

 

[Swaydaa]

wow the last few posts have been in the high 240s-250s. I just got mine back, a 217, and I feel like its the worst score ever now after seeing all of these scores!!!

Good score joaquin13. You did better than 50% of all other students....can't be the worst score. You will do fine with that score!

 

[puffy1]

joaquin13...try not to feel bad about your score. #1, I'm not even sure how important a step 2 score is these days in obtaining a residency. #2, there are many people out there that would rather be in your position. #3, a score doesn't indicate what kind of doctor you're going to be or how successful you will become. Don't let it limit you from applying to the specialty/program of your choice.

This is one of the reasons why I hesitate to post things like scores because it does more harm than good in most cases. I rarely shared a numerical score when a classmate asked me how I did because I knew if I said it out loud, there might be someone who either didn't do as well or out-right failed the same exam who heard me and is now feeling like crapola.

 

[bthings]

Shocker! Got back to NY from an away rotation at Mayo today to find my Step 2 results hanging out of the mail box. Went up from a medicore 217/88 Step 1 to a 236/96 Step 2.
Used:
Crush - once through carefully
Qbank - all questions Avg 67%
B & W - here and there for brief review while watching TV
other than that payed attention and read fairly regularly during 3rd year rotations.


-B

 

[Jaluv]

Got my scores back - got a 244/99. Here's what I did:
One month to study - first two weeks during an easy rotation (where I could sometimes hide and study), last two weeks off
did First Aid for Step 2 - read it thoroughly once, wanted to go back but simply did not have the energy, it just doesn't read as well as First Aid for Step 1 (did use it for reference, though)
did one of the exams in NMS Step 2 question book
did the medicine exams in Appelton and Lange question book
did 92% of Q Bank - think I was averaging 75% at the end - the one thing that I did differently from Step 1 was to go over questions I got wrong - even though I recognized the question stem and answer choices some of the time, I still thought it helped to solidify things a great deal.
did Crush - read through it only once, but wish I had listened to people and picked it up sooner - nice high yield easy read
going to Philly to take Step 2CS tomorrow - I can't take this test-taking anymore - I soooooooooooo tired of it
Good luck to everybody

 

[Swaydaa]

Congrats Bthings and jaluv!!! Those are awesome scores.

Don't sweat Step 2 CS at all. It was a joke. If you spent ANY time in a hospital and speak english there is no reason to worry.

I think we finally have a good thread that covers what to do for Step 2!!

 

[carol ann]

OK - Just got my scores in the mail and I am ecstatic!

246/99

I had about 2 weeks. I did all of Kaplan Q-bankwith an average score of 74%, I bought USMLE world for a month, but ended up not using it too much, because I didn't find it to be very high yield. I also read/skimmed First Aid as a refresher for some big topics, but in retrospect, Kaplan Q-bank was more than adequate test prep (in addition to working my tail off during 3rd year)

 

[ys]

congrats carol ann, could you please let us know how many questions you did from usmleworld and what your percentage was. I have read your previous posts about usmleworld and I agree with you. Unfortunately I don't have time for kaplan.

 

[carol ann]

congrats carol ann, could you please let us know how many questions you did from usmleworld and what your percentage was. I have read your previous posts about usmleworld and I agree with you. Unfortunately I don't have time for kaplan.

I don't know how many USMLE world questions I did -- but I'd guess around 400-500, I think I averaged in the low 60s for percentile...but I stopped doing them in favor of finishing off Kaplan x1

 

[hawkslo]

Most people have noted to know "trauma" cold. Does anyone have a high-yield reference that they recommend?

Thanks.

 

[bignursemd]

question...how long did it take everyone to get their scores....3-4 weeks ?
thanks in advance

 

[Jamezuva]

question...how long did it take everyone to get their scores....3-4 weeks ?
thanks in advance

Yep..about 4 weeks

 

[phillybabe]

has anyone who took the exam on/after sept 24 gotten their scores back yet?

 

[andwhat]

has anyone who took the exam on/after sept 24 gotten their scores back yet?

nope, I am even later than that...28th... so dont worry relax... my oasis should be up hopefully soon...
GL!

 

[BellKicker]

Took mine last week.

I have to say my test had very little trauma on it. There was probably one q along the vein of:

A: Keep airways open and give fluids.
B: Consult a specialist
C: Send patient home.
D: Assurance.

Peds was the big topic for me. Oh well, it's different for everyone.

Good Luck to those who still have to tackle that beast.

 

[kas23]

Can someone explain to me what this "Oasis" is?

 

[Skip Intro]

Can someone explain to me what this "Oasis" is?

It's the document tracking system. You can look to see if you passed, but it will not report your score.

https://external1.nbme.org/ciw/servlet/candidate_menu

You enter your information. If you can't register for the test, you will get a message saying either you are ineligible (i.e., they haven't scored your test yet) or that you "completed" the test (i.e., you passed). If you can register for the test, this means you failed.

Incidentally, I took the Step 2-CK on 9/17 and I just got my score report today. I passed and did okay, but not nearly as well as I did on Step 1. That's all I'm going to say. OB/Gyn and Surgery kicked my ass. Don't blow these off (like I did).

-Skip

 

[Swaydaa]

Congrats on passing Skip. Sorry about sugery. I could not remember any more than 5 surgery questions in my entire exam. I studied my last 5 days only on surgery and was so pissed I waisted all that time.

Anyway, your one step closer to the M.D.

Good luck with your interviews.

 

[Skip Intro]

Sorry about sugery. I could not remember any more than 5 surgery questions in my entire exam.

That's the curious thing. I can't either. But, what they must have considered "surgery" questions, I thought was something else. Either way, I still did "average" on the test, but just a bit disappointed in comparison with my Step 1 score. Generally speaking, most people I've talked to have their score go up, not down, on Step 2.

Anyway.

Good luck with your interviews.

Thanks. You too.

-Skip