Advice: UWorld 2nd time or buy Kaplan Qbank

[vkhullar]

Hey Guys,

I am hoping someone can guide me. My exam is in exactly 30 days, and I have 20% Uworld left to go. I have been scoring a cumulative of 65% on it, completely random mode 48q to a block.

Now I still have to go through all the NBMEs and 2 UWSE but I am wondering if I should just buy a Kaplan Qbank and start doing 1 block of Kaplan and 1 USMLEWorld Qbank blocks a day. Once I run out of UWorld (20% remaining), I will just do random questions that I have already seen.

So my question is - Should I do Kaplan and Uworld together or do you think it is better to just do UWorld again?

Also, I am planning to do DIT in the next 15 days or so. Advice?

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[PokerDoc]

personally, I thought Kaplan was an abomination and should be banished forever. IF you want a second qbank I liked USMLERx better but I def vote for UW round 2

 

[ar2388]

round 2 sounds like a good idea...

 

[vkhullar]

personally, I thought Kaplan was an abomination and should be banished forever. IF you want a second qbank I liked USMLERx better but I def vote for UW round 2

The trouble I am having with UW round 2 is that I just did round 1 minus 20% in the last 20 days, so I seem to remember the questions.

I looked at USMLERx (a friend has it) and the concern I have is that it seems straight out of FA, no second order thinking. I looked at like 50 questions though of it, so n = small.

I think USMLE is more 2nd order or 3rd order, so Kaplan is more closer to it than Rx. Am I wrong?

 

[PokerDoc]

The trouble I am having with UW round 2 is that I just did round 1 minus 20% in the last 20 days, so I seem to remember the questions.

I looked at USMLERx (a friend has it) and the concern I have is that it seems straight out of FA, no second order thinking. I looked at like 50 questions though of it, so n = small.

I think USMLE is more 2nd order or 3rd order, so Kaplan is more closer to it than Rx. Am I wrong?

kaplan doesnt ask you second or third order questions, they ask you nit picky stupid low yield ******* details 99% of the time. (By that I mean they dont test your ability to comprehend, just whether you memorized a step in a pathway). Thats just my own opinion, see what others say.. I hated kaplan


and you said youre still 30 days out? why not wait 15-20 days and do UW in your last week or so

 

[aashkab]

you can select high yield only on kaplan, that is another option to avoid the nitty gritty details. and it does expose you to new details. the problem is that it doesn't give you a good explanation of them.

 

[badasshairday]

Rx. You are going to have to learn First Aid one way or the other. I think Rx would be money for micro/biochem/behavioral. Definitely drill in those and you can redo WORLD also if you like, or just do wrong/marked.

 

[vkhullar]

Rx. You are going to have to learn First Aid one way or the other. I think Rx would be money for micro/biochem/behavioral. Definitely drill in those and you can redo WORLD also if you like, or just do wrong/marked.

Rx wasnt even my top choice for a 2nd Qbank. Why is Rx so much better than Kaplan. Even FA says Kaplan is better than Rx in their review of books. I really thought it asked straight forward questions.

Can anyone who has taken the Step advise me as well please.

 

[PokerDoc]

Its just personal preference.. and I know my classmates all liked Rx better than Kaplan too.. I always get messages on gchat from classmates who were using Kaplan telling me about a question and we'd have a good laugh about it because of how irrelevant it was.

 

[MilkmanAl]

kaplan doesnt ask you second or third order questions, they ask you nit picky stupid low yield ******* details 99% of the time.

That's a big reason why I gave my subscription away. Rx isn't exactly a favorite of mine, but I liked it quite a lot better, from what little experience I had with Kaplan. (3 blocks, I think? Can't recall.)

I'd redo UW over buying anything else. There's no doubt about it.

 

[sswang00]

do you guys all have 6 month uworld subscriptions?
I want to redo UWorld as well but only have a 3month subscription.

How do u guys make sure you go through each question a second time?
I am considering marking every single question when I finish a test (still on my first run) so that for my second run I will choose "marked questions only"

is there any other way around this?

 

[MilkmanAl]

I have a 2 month subscription.

My magic recipe for getting through the whole shebang multiple times was as follows (in this order):

Doing questions by...
1. subject doing unused questions.

2. organ system, picking and choosing subjects to get as close to 48-question blocks as possible, marking every question as I went

3. totally random blocks of marked questions

 

[vkhullar]

That's a big reason why I gave my subscription away. Rx isn't exactly a favorite of mine, but I liked it quite a lot better, from what little experience I had with Kaplan. (3 blocks, I think? Can't recall.)

I'd redo UW over buying anything else. There's no doubt about it.

Thanks so much for all the input guys. Appreciate it. I think you are right, I think I should go over UWorld again. I might borrow a friends USMLERx account if need be since he write 15 days before me.

 

[SxRx]

Here's my take on redoing UW.
I was done with the first round of UW about a 3 weeks ago and I took the exam today. Since the first round I redid about 35% of the questions. Personally I didn't find it too helpful because I recalled the correct answers to say 50-75% of the questions before even finish reading the questions. So, I tried redoing some of the Rx questions and I found that I couldn't answer many more of Rx questions than the UW questions. It may have been so mainly because I stopped doing the Rx questions back in Feb. If there is a different way to drill the learned material rather than redoing the same questions that's what will help you more I think.
I ended up getting 93% avg on the second pass and I ended up with 69% during the first pass. For me the 2 things that was helpful with the second pass was just staying familiar with the question types and being able to drill down a small minority of the concepts (not all....I guess for me if I didn't get the idea after all this time I wasn't going to get them late in the game). The stuff I knew, I knew them well and didn't feel repeating them again with the same questions helped while the ones I struggled with in the past no matter how many times I reviewed didn't get any better with the second pass.

By the way, my exam was HARD! I'd say the difficulty level was definitely on par with UW.

 

[chaeymaey]

Personally, I really liked Kaplan Qbank this year. They changed alot of things that people didn't like about it in the past, and I felt like it was a lot like my USMLE.

 

[PokerDoc]

Here's my take on redoing UW.
I was done with the first round of UW about a 3 weeks ago and I took the exam today. Since the first round I redid about 35% of the questions. Personally I didn't find it too helpful because I recalled the correct answers to say 50-75% of the questions before even finish reading the questions. So, I tried redoing some of the Rx questions and I found that I couldn't answer many more of Rx questions than the UW questions. It may have been so mainly because I stopped doing the Rx questions back in Feb. If there is a different way to drill the learned material rather than redoing the same questions that's what will help you more I think.
I ended up getting 93% avg on the second pass and I ended up with 69% during the first pass. For me the 2 things that was helpful with the second pass was just staying familiar with the question types and being able to drill down a small minority of the concepts (not all....I guess for me if I didn't get the idea after all this time I wasn't going to get them late in the game). The stuff I knew, I knew them well and didn't feel repeating them again with the same questions helped while the ones I struggled with in the past no matter how many times I reviewed didn't get any better with the second pass.

By the way, my exam was HARD! I'd say the difficulty level was definitely on par with UW.

yeah but that other 25% that you didnt remember is the whole reason its worth going over things you got wrong. It means you learned most of it.. for other people, theyre gonna do worse than you did.. and a second pass is even more worthwhile.

 

[MilkmanAl]

A 93% average? Dear God. In any case, as long as you remember why the right answers are the right answers, you're still putting in solid studying. If you're just going through and picking things because they had a green check next to them when you last saw them, you're not helping yourself at all.

 

[PokerDoc]

A 93% average? Dear God. In any case, as long as you remember why the right answers are the right answers, you're still putting in solid studying. If you're just going through and picking things because they had a green check next to them when you last saw them, you're not helping yourself at all.

well this is pretty much why the percentile is a garbage indicator of your performance lol