Took the test today, not really sure how I feel about it. I'm going to echo what a lot of people said here -- the test was a lot harder than I expected. Here's my overall rambling impression, wanted to share before I forget, since it helped me read about other people's experiences:
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Time issue: This was a major one for me, especially those blocks with the lengthy abstracts and dubious study designs. I was finishing my UW timed blocks in 45 min, while on the real thing I was going up to 55 min with 5 panicky minutes left to review marked questions. I had a tough start, first two blocks were slow (I was spending way too long on some question stems). The middle few blocks weren't too bad after I took a snack break, and ended the last few blocks a little better. (Those abstracts took FOREVER even when I tried being smart and read the questions first. For my last block, I just marked the abstract questions and saved them for last...worked out MUCH better).
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Block breakdown: Every block had about 2-3 wtf questions (there was one where I recognized only ONE of the 7 answer choices, the others didn't even look English, so I picked the choice I recognized...), and about 8-9 where I was able to narrow it down to 2 and then it was all 50-50, kind of like the exam writers playing guess-what-I'm-thinking. There was SO many questions where at least 2 things were 'the next best option' and doing either one first would be acceptable. There were mostly management questions, followed by many diagnosis questions. Lots of gimmes which were so easy, I started doubting my answers... Also, those linked questions where you can't change the answer in the first one and see the answer when you go to the question -- definitely missed a few of those and that threw me off.
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Subject-wise: For some reason, all I can think of is many OB questions, which I'm not a fan of. Medicine heavy, not much Surgery. Some Peds here and there, and some very, very strange questions where all I could think of was, "Whaaa....seriously?" (example, just making this up: patient with neuralgias and pruritis during pregnancy, and one of the answer choices was something like 'pruritic neuralgias of pregnancy') Some questions where the description of the answers were changed so that you had to think, "what is another way of saying X, because both A and B could be the answer". ID wasn't too bad. Some cardiology media murmur questions. Ethics wasn't too bad, except some weird 'preventing errors in hand-off' type questions where any of the answers could work in real life...Can't think of anything else now except questions I got wrong
Oh, and here's a brief breakdown of my prep
-Step 1: 240s.
-Step 2 CS - Pass
-Third year shelves: mid-high 80s.
Prep: 12 days of 10-12 hours studying.
Sources: UW (First time. All timed, random, unused blocks. Finished ~ 78%, cummulative average = 70%, upward trend toward the end),
Secrets (very high yield, read one time in detail, 2nd time got about half-way though),
Goljan path as reference (was actually pretty high yield for pathophysiology stuff not covered in Secrets. Was planning to read MTB but never got around to it.
Things working against me: taking it so late in the year (wish I had taken it over the summer when things are fresher), not much time to study and UW became my major source (not sure if that's a good idea).
I hope it really is normal to feel this awful about the test...I didn't feel so badly after Step 1. Seeing the scores that people are getting here after having a bad test day gives me hope
Good luck to those who're taking it soon. Hope this helped!
