Kaplan micro is money. I took the shelf in mid december. There were a few questions that i only knew the answer from having read Kaplan. Their genetics/resistance section is thorough too and there were actually quite a few of those questions on the exam (definitely more than 5%). Dont worry about the pharmacology - I think I had like two pharm related questions (both asked about the mechanism of action of acyclovir - which seemed really odd to me to ask the same question twice).
They way I studied for my class all year was to read CMMRS as a first pass. 2nd pass was to add Kaplan micro into the tables of CMMRS. Then I just studied the annotated tables until I felt I learned it. For the shelf, I just reviewed my tables and glanced over FA but there was nothing in FA I didnt already have with the annotation of CMMRS. I felt like FA was pretty sparse with some of the bugs and diseases, it would like say like one or two words and that was it. There were also micro cards that were really helpful. We'll see how I did when we get our scores back, but there were no questions where I felt like "Ive never seen that before," which I think is most important. The rest is just fine tuning study skills and maximizing my capacity to memorize.
