64% on pre-test Neuro? pass?

[Bun]

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Is this enough to get me a pass on the shelf? i just finished all 500 questions. i take the real thing soon, thanks

 

[bigfrank]

I got only about 75% right, and my percentile was 99. I wouldn't worry; you'll surely pass.

 

[Mike59]

Don't get your hopes up/down based on Pretest...
Those books can be beyond random. I remember that for one shelf I went through Pretest and got like 73%. Went through it again, memorized all the concepts and got like 95%. On the NBME: 61! 🙁

 

[TruTrooper]

Is this enough to get me a pass on the shelf? i just finished all 500 questions. i take the real thing soon, thanks

Pre-test is a great learning tool for the exam but it just doesn't represent the real deal like most of the Pre-test books. The real shelf vignettes are longer and more convoluted.

I cringe when I come across the Pre-test questions that has three consecutive questions dealing on one scenario since the shelf is not like that at all...one question per patient. This is just an example.

While I never calculated my Pre-test scores, I do know that the Neuro test was tough even though I honored my Neuroscince class in med school, done neuro research and exterships and plan to go into Neuro. I did quite well on the test but that doesn't mean that the difficulty of the test didn't have me sweating bullets after about the 40th vignette or so.

Time permitting, I would supplement those Pre-test questions with ones that are closer to the actual style of the shelf. I still think you can pass with what you have achieved thus far though.

 

[Pox in a box]

I got only about 75% right, and my percentile was 99. I wouldn't worry; you'll surely pass.

Curved?

 

[bigfrank]

Curved?

All Shelf exams, like Step I, are standardized so you're competing with your peers on a national level. And my 75% was on PreTest, not the Shelf. 😉

 

[Entei]

All Shelf exams, like Step I, are standardized so you're competing with your peers on a national level. And my 75% was on PreTest, not the Shelf. 😉

Admittedly, I'm still new at the whole being a third year thing, but we were told that our shelf performance would be compared only to that of our classmates at our institution who were on the same rotation. This amounts to about 15 students. Our results were returned to us in about a week, and we were given a mean for our 15 scores but no national percentile to correspond to any individual score.

From past threads it seems like the tests are standardized because they're designed to have a mean of 70. Maybe the NBME does collect all the results nationally to ensure that they're standardizing the exam correctly, but at no point is your individual score compared to whatever national bell curve they generate from that administration of that particular exam. At least, that was my understanding of how the shelf exams were scored, but stats were never my strong suit.

 

[Pox in a box]

All Shelf exams, like Step I, are standardized so you're competing with your peers on a national level. And my 75% was on PreTest, not the Shelf. 😉

I was joking.

 

[pharmer]

Although not neuro, my family practice rotation I'm on takes our raw scores for the shelf and uses them to calculate our grades 😱

 

[bigfrank]

I was joking.

Funny.

 

[Pox in a box]

Funny.

So was your comment "Want a cookie?".

 

[bigfrank]

So was your comment "Want a cookie?".

Do trolls have a Pox gene?

 

[Pox in a box]

Do trolls have a Pox gene?

I don't know, do you?