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Took COMSAE C yesterday and didn't do as well as I would have hoped. Anyone else taken it? Think it will be representative of COMLEX? Any other COMSAEs that may be more representative?
My school purchased a Form C for us from NBOME. . . I just checked and see that it isn't available on their site. . maybe you could contact them? It would be just like NBOME to make a test available to some and not to others 🙂
I heard that they rescored the COMLEX recently. . .maybe that is why the drop in scores? Anyone else heard anything like that?
I haven't heard much except that my percentile rank dropped for Level 1.
How did you take COMSAE C? There is only form A and B for phase 2 available on the NBOME site.
I took form A this morning and scored better (632) than I thought based on how I felt during it. I've been using UW (~70%), MTB, COMQUEST (75%), Step 2 Secrets and Savarese. I take USLME step 2 on Monday and COMLEX CE on Wednesday. I'll update how it went after I'm done.
I would focus on UWORLD right now to learn the material, can switch to combank and comquest later to figure out the way they ask questions. But, I would first focus on getting the material down well and think UW would do a better job than any other source.
Thanks for the suggestions.
But I have 7 weeks left plus I'm doing my last rotation, in the end I will only have 2.5 dedicated studying time. Do you still think I should do UWORLD? Thanks again.
Yes. If you do UWorld blocks/review and as much reading as you can during your rotation, you should be able to ramp it up once you have your 2.5weeks out and do well. It seems like you have plenty of time, just make sure you're doing questions and reading. Best of luck!
The test was full of more "WTF" moments. You have the ability to comment on each question and I felt like commenting on at least 1/3 of them but I didn't. Peds and ob weren't too bad. Had quite a bit of urology. Also make sure you know ankle OMM well, specifically the motion of the talus and subtalar joints and tibia for supination and pronation.
Wow, that's awful!! This happened to everyone across the country today. Same thing happened to 3 of my classmates. I'm taking it Friday and praying this doesn't happen again. Good luck with rescheduling and all.
They're claiming they found the error--the exam was coded as a half-day exam rather than a full-day exam--and have fixed it, so hopefully you won't have any issues on Friday.
Sounds like they're giving everyone the option of taking the remaining half of the exam within the next 30 days, or retaking the full exam if you'd rather do that. Better than nothing, I suppose. But, these were just "preferences" or some such thing given to me by the operator, who said I would be called by some kind of Prometric Scheduling Action Force Strike Team or some such thing within the next 2 business days. We'll see what they say if/when they finally call me to reschedule.
For those that took the test recently:
What percentage of your exam was OMM? Trying to triage for my exam tomorrow.
Can I get away with just knowing the gimmie stuff in Savarese?
That would be amazing if you could take the rest of the exam within the next thirty days. I would pick that hands down..the unfortunate thing is finding open spots is difficult unless they somehow open up testing centers to accommodate us...I can't believe that happened. I was about to pass out when I saw the screen go to prometric starting the second half of the day. Oh well it is what it is I hope nobody else has to experience this. Its hard when you mentally prepare yourself to charge through questions then all of a sudden everything stops 🙁.
A few of my classmates have called prometric and it sounds like they are mass calling a bunch of people to get their choice of options. Then they will give us a decision early next week. Hopefully it's not a majority rules type of decision. We should each get to choose the route since they screwed us over. Also they were told there were going to be more dates opened for us.
I thought it was pretty similar to COMSAE A in regards to "WTF-ness" of the questions. Didn't seem to be more than 15-20% OMM from what I remember. The OMM wasn't too bad though. I took the USMLE two days before the COMLEX so my brain wasn't functioning as well as I would've liked. If given the option, I want to retake the entire test.
Just finished it about 3 hours ago. Totally agree. There were a ton of WTF questions. Some crazy medical legal questions. Standard OMM questions and then some really vague (at least I thought) questions.
I studied mainly for USMLE (which I took 2 days ago) and I think it really hurt me on this one. USMLE questions are longer, however, it is easier to rule out other wrong answers with all the information they give you.
In the COMLEX a lot of the questions were maybe 3 or 4 lines and then they ask you what is the most likely diagnosis. So if you don't know exactly what diagnosis will most likely cause those specific 3-4 signs/symptoms you are screwed. You either know it or you don't.
Sample:
You get a 45 year old lady who walks in with a palpable pelvic mass. What's the most likely diagnosis?....
In general I felt like commenting on a lot of the questions but didn't even bother. For once the OMM questions were more straight forward then the medicine questions. I felt 10X better walking out of the USMLE then I did the COMLEX today. So my advice is do some more COMBANK questions if you really need the score on this one...
Just finished it about 3 hours ago. Totally agree. There were a ton of WTF questions. Some crazy medical legal questions. Standard OMM questions and then some really vague (at least I thought) questions.
I studied mainly for USMLE (which I took 2 days ago) and I think it really hurt me on this one. USMLE questions are longer, however, it is easier to rule out other wrong answers with all the information they give you.
In the COMLEX a lot of the questions were maybe 3 or 4 lines and then they ask you what is the most likely diagnosis. So if you don't know exactly what diagnosis will most likely cause those specific 3-4 signs/symptoms you are screwed. You either know it or you don't.
Sample:
You get a 45 year old lady who walks in with a palpable pelvic mass. What's the most likely diagnosis?....
In general I felt like commenting on a lot of the questions but didn't even bother. For once the OMM questions were more straight forward then the medicine questions. I felt 10X better walking out of the USMLE then I did the COMLEX today. So my advice is do some more COMBANK questions if you really need the score on this one...
was one of the people that took the exam on the 27th when they accidentally "coded it for a half day" exam, and one of the people that ended up finishing it. don't remember too much about it, outside of feeling more rushed than normal but managed to squeeze in under the 4 hour half-way point which ended up really being the end point. there were a handful of 'comlex' type questions which i left a note for advising them that their question was outside the scope of what our knowledge was expected to be, and the OMM was nothing you won't be able to handle with a night or two with savarese ahead of the exam. One or two random chapman's points that I missed but I really didn't feel like committing all of them to memory as I was more interested in learning real medicine for the USMLE.
it wasn't as horrible of an experience as i've heard some people describe it ("Pt has a rash. what is it?" question stems weren't that vague, but were still lacking info that would help guide you towards a right diagnosis after narrowing it down to 2 or 3. Judgment calls. So wouldn't be surprised if I did well vs did poorly. More frustrating were the questions where there were multiple correct answers. I'm not talking about "next best step" type questions, I'm talking about two answer choices were clearly correct (also wrote it in the comment section.)
All in all, just glad it's over with. Finished up with USMLE's Step 2 two days later on Friday. +NBOME called me yesterday to advise that I had two options to take. Redo the entire test, or sit on my score of the test I've already taken. Somewhere in there I was hoping for secret option c where I can wait for my scores to come out then decide whether or not I want to retake it. (402 or above? I'll take that.) I'm not sure how I feel about it because the second I noticed that the timer didn't reset for the second half of the exam, I didn't really take time to notice if the questions were ridiculous or not...I was just answering stuff to try and make it in time. I feel like I reasoned out things to the best of my ability, but know that it can easily go wrong given the testing situation. I'm probably not going to retake it because I don't want to deal with the hassle of rescheduling the exam, my fourth year elective/audition rotations start in two days, and I want to say I passed. Just curious how the curve will work if there's only like 10-20 people that really finished the exam. Pretty sure we're not all taking the same exam anyways, but people have implied otherwise, and would be a brutal,odd curve with a n=20.
I read SU2M throughout the year, ran thru Uworld 1x alongside each clerkship (59% avg), did DIT + SU2S2 in the middle of my last rotation. UWorld again (77% avg). The last week I think I did 80%ish of COMQUEST.
Took the NBOME my school administered 4 weeks out. Took two NBME's and the UWSA (like 3 months, 2 months and 3 weeks out.) Didn't felt like it would be productive to do it towards the end because I would have rather been doing UW questions or reading and actually learning a new thing or two.

the problem with those questions is do you answer them with the current guidelines or not. It makes it almost impossible to choose. I personally love those questions because I have two small children and know the guidelines, but knowing how the comlex is the current recommendations probably aren't even the correct answer.