Allotted board prep time @ your DO school

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5-6 weeks depending if you failed our schools OSCE (most people fail at least one). So 5 for most.
 
Mehd School said:
Around 4 weeks at DCOM.
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this is actually 6 weeks if you consider the fact that we only have OMM and FMHC 1-2x a week. hard science classes ended today. we have from may 20-june 11 to study with no classes at all.
 
schwasted589 said:
this is actually 6 weeks if you consider the fact that we only have OMM and FMHC 1-2x a week. hard science classes ended today. we have from may 20-june 11 to study with no classes at all.
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My god am I glad they changed the curriculum to do that. I wonder how pissed the 3rd years and fellows must be.
 
OU-HCOM is now giving their students almost 2 months to study for boards (yayy for me 🙂). Although most of us are planning on taking it earlier so we have a couple weeks off prior to clinical rotations...
 
xBODOMx said:
Anyone know why they want to change it?
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There are quite a few reasons given but it is clear that there just as many reasons not given, if you take my meaning. They are revamping the clinical years to address a perceived weakness in the Step 2 exams that will result in more time to study for Step 2 (I've never heard anyone claim a need for that), more time in between graduation and residency (yay no financial aid available for that extra 2 months), and the one really good thing is time for one extra rotation that will be dedicated wards based...because no other medical students in the area rotate during June. So that's nice, but in order to make time for this schedule they are cutting down on some vacation times, starting 1st and 2nd year one week earlier, and cutting Step 1 study time down by 2 weeks. Oh and it will be a lot of fun to go straight from spring finals to ACLS to taking the boards and on into rotation without any time off. If you have to move for rotations their advice is, "Take the exam where you will be moving to." Really it is more like 3 weeks dedicated prep when one takes ACLS and the test week into account, so I feel bad for people who have to move during that time.

AZCOM has had high averages for years now, but they claim that it was better before they changed to a 6 week prep time instead of 4. Most of my class is rather angry about this change but there isn't anything to do but change strategies for 2nd year. Spring quarter is already quite light and they say they will try to make it a little lighter, which might count for a lot. It might turn out for the better and there are some definite benefits to be had, but I just can't shake the feeling that they are revamping things for the sake of the 10% at the expense of the 90%.
 
Spindrift11B4 said:
There are quite a few reasons given but it is clear that there just as many reasons not given, if you take my meaning. They are revamping the clinical years to address a perceived weakness in the Step 2 exams that will result in more time to study for Step 2 (I've never heard anyone claim a need for that), more time in between graduation and residency (yay no financial aid available for that extra 2 months), and the one really good thing is time for one extra rotation that will be dedicated wards based...because no other medical students in the area rotate during June. So that's nice, but in order to make time for this schedule they are cutting down on some vacation times, starting 1st and 2nd year one week earlier, and cutting Step 1 study time down by 2 weeks. Oh and it will be a lot of fun to go straight from spring finals to ACLS to taking the boards and on into rotation without any time off. If you have to move for rotations their advice is, "Take the exam where you will be moving to." Really it is more like 3 weeks dedicated prep when one takes ACLS and the test week into account, so I feel bad for people who have to move during that time.

AZCOM has had high averages for years now, but they claim that it was better before they changed to a 6 week prep time instead of 4. Most of my class is rather angry about this change but there isn't anything to do but change strategies for 2nd year. Spring quarter is already quite light and they say they will try to make it a little lighter, which might count for a lot. It might turn out for the better and there are some definite benefits to be had, but I just can't shake the feeling that they are revamping things for the sake of the 10% at the expense of the 90%.
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I think the drop in step 2 had to do wit the new score psychometric review thing that NBOME instituted. I think 6 weeks should be minimum time
 
Mehd School said:
My god am I glad they changed the curriculum to do that. I wonder how pissed the 3rd years and fellows must be.
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Your school should do a study of how good students do before the change and after. I would love to know the result.
 
Mehd School said:
My god am I glad they changed the curriculum to do that. I wonder how pissed the 3rd years and fellows must be.
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IslandStyle808 said:
Your school should do a study of how good students do before the change and after. I would love to know the result.
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obviously n=1 and I haven't taken the test but I'm curious if this is actually helpful or not. I know in previous years, my friends had already been doing questions/studying consistently since january (march at the latest). By giving us 6 weeks, they basically crammed EVERYTHING to the point where I've been struggling to keep up with just classes (along with our wonderful EPC quizzes--don't get me started on that class). Most people in our class are waiting till now to start their studying. And even then, we still have SIMs, and FMHC, and mandatory OPP labs so who knows. It is nice to have our science classes out of the way though, at the least.

And from what I understand, credit goes to class of '16 for this change; I heard they realllly made a fuss about how terrible the old schedule was and admin finally listened.
 
xBODOMx said:
Anyone know why they want to change it?
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It's a little complicated, and I am about to oversimplify in an attempt to answer your question: We thought we were going to keep 6 weeks for studying as of about 2 months ago, but the overriding MWU governing body (whatever they happen to call themselves) wanted to have the CCOM and AZCOM campuses on the same basic schedule. Also, AZCOM used to have 4 weeks to study, and 6 weeks was implemented as an experiment. The school wanted to see if the COMLEX and USMLE would go up. It turns out that there was no appreciable increase in board scores given the extra 2 weeks.
 
AZCOM does some weird stuff. They make a solid effort to be responsive to student feedback (after tons of student pressure almost all lectures are recorded. Yay!!) But occasionally the solutions they come up with are worse than the original problem and just make you think, "where on earth did they come up with that?"

The new schedule seems really forced to be. Previously, breaks happened at logical times and so on, but the new schedule is just confusing, and it seems to be a solution looking for a problem.
 
QualityProcess said:
I both agree and disagree with this... you don't need 8 weeks like many students seem to think, but I think there is a minimum amount of time that is very helpful to unplug from the routine and get into boards mode. You have to have time to revisit material you haven't seen in a year, even if when you were originally tested, you mastered it.

And you definitely can cram for boards. Not all the material obviously, but you can definitely cram pharm and micro in the last week or two.
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I agree with you about the cramming stuff. But honestly, I think Uworld needs to be bought at the begining of MSII to thorougly go through it and then refreshed again during boards study time. That's what i woulda done
 
psych72 said:
I agree with you about the cramming stuff. But honestly, I think Uworld needs to be bought at the begining of MSII to thorougly go through it and then refreshed again during boards study time. That's what i woulda done
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Doing Uworld at the beginning of MS2 would be useless. Maybe something like USMLERx, but not Uworld. You need more path under your belt before you even attempt doing those questions and expecting to get something out of them.

Also, there's only like 2300 questions in Uworld, so that's 25 days of only 2 blocks a day. It doesn't require 9 months of studying.
 
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psych72 said:
I agree with you about the cramming stuff. But honestly, I think Uworld needs to be bought at the begining of MSII to thorougly go through it and then refreshed again during boards study time. That's what i woulda done
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I don't think this is a good approach at all, but that's just me. I did USMLERx by system along with classes and then Kaplan QBank on random 2nd semester of MS2 and thought this was a good way to get in a lot more questions without having to reuse content. I was happy I saved UWorld for dedicated study period so it wasn't so overwhelming and I already had a lot of questions under my belt. Repeating the same questions is far less useful than doing fresh ones, at least in my experience.
 
jkdoctor said:
Can you elaborate further?
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it's obviously a simplified schedule, so my criticism was harsh.

i think some of the more difficult/time consuming topics such as biochemistry need to be learned a little each day. cramming a couple days of biochem followed by 4 weeks away from it will not be very effective.
 
SurgeDO said:
it's obviously a simplified schedule, so my criticism was harsh.

i think some of the more difficult/time consuming topics such as biochemistry need to be learned a little each day. cramming a couple days of biochem followed by 4 weeks away from it will not be very effective.
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This is going to be my biggest problem for when I take boards. I can study biochem for a whole week and become a pro at it, but give me 4 weeks away from it and I'll practically remember nothing.
 
TopTomato said:
This is going to be my biggest problem for when I take boards. I can study biochem for a whole week and become a pro at it, but give me 4 weeks away from it and I'll practically remember nothing.
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Hahah no the biggest problem is going to be that you spent 1 week studying human biochem and then you will have questions about photosynthesis.
 
TopTomato said:
This is going to be my biggest problem for when I take boards. I can study biochem for a whole week and become a pro at it, but give me 4 weeks away from it and I'll practically remember nothing.
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This is why it's good to do questions on random that last month, you will have seen all the biochem you need by test time and not just have crammed and purged from a month before. No one gets questions on photosynthesis, I don't think I got anything that wasn't presented within a clinical context.
 
MedBrah 19 said:
5 weeks for 2016 onwards
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Nice! Last year it was two weeks, and the infamous CSI course was a week longer. But other changes are taking place too, like the integration of immunology and micro together, so we will see how everything pans out. Good luck!
 
At RowanSOM we have Kaplan lectures starting in March because we all decided to use part of our spring break to cover some topics. We are all supplemented with books way before that. We finished everything on April 30th with 3 exams that week but most of us were grade locked by this point so you could say we started around the last week of April. From here it depends on when you take the exam but the majority of the class is taking it around the 2nd week of June although dates vary. We also have a COMSAE scheduled on the 21st to see how we are doing.
 
WhyDoWeFall said:
At RowanSOM we have Kaplan lectures starting in March because we all decided to use part of our spring break to cover some topics. We are all supplemented with books way before that. We finished everything on April 30th with 3 exams that week but most of us were grade locked by this point so you could say we started around the last week of April. From here it depends on when you take the exam but the majority of the class is taking it around the 2nd week of June although dates vary. We also have a COMSAE scheduled on the 21st to see how we are doing.
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That's an awesome schedule. We just finished a string of 4-8 hr exams (shelf exams, combank, comsae, and school created mock board) that sucked essentially the last week and a half of weekdays out of everyone's study time. We also have 12 hrs of lecture in the next couple days, and more than half the class is taking the exams in the next 1.5-2 wks...
 
6 days at LECOM. We finished ACLS last Thursday and I take comlex tomorrow. I've been studying since January 4th so I'm clearly ready to be done 😉

thanks, LECOM.
 
Bump: WesternU?
 
TCOM gives 6 weeks. Most take 5 of dedicated and 1 of vacation.
 
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