Anyone else taking Step 2 when the 'lights went out'?

[amw10]

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I was halfway done with the last block of Step 2 when the 'great blackout of 2003' occurred. Having issues with NBME as to how to get a score. Wondering if anyone else is in the same predicament?

 

[Kosmo]

No, but my interest is piqued.
I wonder what they would do in such a situation, how much had you completed? (I imagine you had completed most of it given that the blackout occured after 4pm EST.)

I would think that nothing less than a free retake at the time and place of your choice, if not satisfied with your score, would be satisfactory.

 

[LoneSEAL]

Damn that sux. I think someone on this board had a problem where the computer crashed; the crash didn't allow the person to finish the block up. I think the usmle response was to for the person to either keep the score with the missed questions counted as incorrect OR to take a retest of the exam.

I'm gonna guess the nbme will in this case give the person the same two options. At this point, it might be a tough decision. Who knows how many extra points those missed questions might have contributed? Also, what if you, by the stroke of luck, had a relatively easy form of the exam. Would you want to retest knowing that you might get a much harder form?

 

[pma1234]

I was the person described in the above post...
I had missed 30 questions in the whole test....my test exp is detailed on the usmle.net board under the name aditya

but the good part is they tell u the score to help u decide

i know it a very depressing situation, if u need help or more info mail me
[email protected]

 

[theodore]

Loneseal, I thought you were dead. Or that you were analyzing the poll for the step 1 scores, since that was where I saw you posting for the last time🙂 How did you do in step 1, by the way? I still remember that "mission impossible" post of yours. Did it turn out to be really impossible or you voted for that 260+?

 

[LoneSEAL]

Originally posted by theodore
Loneseal, I thought you were dead. Or that you were analyzing the poll for the step 1 scores, since that was where I saw you posting for the last time🙂 How did you do in step 1, by the way? I still remember that "mission impossible" post of yours. Did it turn out to be really impossible or you voted for that 260+?

hehe...someone remembers me 😀 I still read SDN everyday, although I don't post as often. Clerkships have introduced a whole new set of challenges and worries that have really sapped my energy, and sometimes my sanity.

Ahh, I had totally forgotten about my mission impossible post. I think in that post I said I was shooting for a 270 on my step 1, right? Well, I fell short of my goal: I got a 255.

It's weird for me to think that 2 years of sweat and toil; the nights of reading Robbins Pathology into the wee hours while the world slept; and the frustration I felt learning trivia in First Aid such as adrenoleukodystrophy, tuberous sclerosis, and Gerstmann's syndrome is ALL encapsulated into my Step 1 score. It's hard not to tie your sense of worth as a student and as a doctor into what you get on the exam.

theodore, sorry to hear about your step 1 score. I know you studied hard and a lot so your score must certainly have been disappointing for you 🙁 Still, it's not the end of the world -- you just have to work harder to get where you want.

Are you now turning your attention to Step 2?

 

[theodore]

Well, 76 was not exactly what I had in mind 2 days before the exam, having finished q bank with a 70%cumulative, the released items with 75% and connecting these with the correlations I had seen on this site.. I wasn t going to ace it anyway, but an 80-85 was what would make me a very happy person. But I screwed up big time on the last 1-1.5 blocks, so I can t blame anyone but my stamina(which again isn t something I didn t work on, but anyway..)
I had 1.5 months of vacation, since I figured this was the first free summer after 10 years or so, and the last free summer before I go into pension. Only thing I did about step 2 was to order the books, but I didn t dare opening them, I m gonna do that on September 1st. I m not so worried about it, the conditions for this test are much better for me than for step 1. I m gonna have much more time to study for it and more importantly, studying will be the same for step 2 and my rotations. Lost too much time in step 1 trying to study for clinical rotations on one hand and reviewing basic sciences on the other. Unfortunately, I can only focus at one target at a time🙁
More importantly, I m not gonna kill myself over this exam this time around.Sacrificed too much for step 1 to be rewarded with the bare minimum, so i m gonna loosen up my programm and let the chips fall where they may. Ok, big congrats for that 255, good luck with your clerkshipsand and all that. Oh, and SDN is a big time sanity guard, I would say it s something like"insanitus anonymous". You just write what bothers you and there s always someone to relate to it😉