Average step 1 score for each medical school?

[Beacopp665]

are you so dense where you can't understand what I mean by memorizing robbins? like really, you can get a 260 but you can't understand what I mean.

I get what you mean it just doesn't make sense. Like red panda said people that learn pathology well are obviously going to do well on step 1... Idk why this is such a foreign concept to you. Even if you're just short term memorizing for an exam you still learned it at some point so step 1 studying is just sharpening your recall. Why doing well in class means you wouldn't do well on step 1 doesn't make sense to me, so we can just agree to disagree on this one

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[operaman]

A couple thoughts come to mind:

1) When pontificating about a major exam, people should include whether or not they have actually taken said exam in their post. I feel like a lot of the Step 1 advice comes from people who haven't even taken it yet, which makes about as much sense as me (MS4) trying to give advice to graduating residents on their upcoming specialty boards.

2) I've never met anyone who scored highly on step 1 argue that learning the material well for classes was not important. There seems to be a false dichotomy that says you can EITHER do well in classes OR do well on Step 1. You can either spend your Ms2 year pouring over FA, World, Goljian, Pathoma, et al, OR you can spend it studying class notes, Robbins, etc. This would be true if classes and steps tested entirely different material, but the reality is that they actually do test the same stuff. This is true regardless of whether you feel your school "teaches to the boards" or not; just because your exams have a handful of PhD minutiae questions does not mean that your school doesn't teach the same material. Those of us who have taken Step 1 can attest that there are definitely a number of minutiae questions on that exam too!

The key factor which throws people on Step exams and shelf exams is the apparent ambiguity in so many of the questions. The writers have taken great pains to create questions that require you to reason based on your accumulated knowledge base. These are often the questions people will describe as "there was no way I could have studied for that." These are the questions that leave people feeling defeated as they leave the testing center. These are the questions that force you to integrate across every source you've ever read, especially your classwork when you learned the concepts initially. Neither memorizing Robbins nor memorizing FA/W/P will be enough; you have to truly learn and incorporate all the material you can to the point where you start to see and understand the underlying patterns of path, pharm, physio, etc. They are going to ask you about things you've never seen or studied before and expect you to reason the answer based on the broader patterns you've learned.

 

[PL198]

No one argues that dichotomy at all. The one people say is that you can likely do very well on one or the other. It's 3.5/260 vs 4.0/240. Yeah I'm taking the 260 all day. I'm not saying a 10th percentile kid is going to get a 260. No one is.

 

[PL198]

It's still a false dichotomy, just a less extreme one.

I know the valedictorian of my med school class very well. He had honors in every clinical rotation, routinely got 98-100 on preclinical exams, and had I think a 265 if I remember what he told me.

Excellence in one domain frequently translates into excellence in the others, since there is (a) tremendous content overlap and (b) the common keys to success at all of them are discipline, work ethic, and intelligence

Also, contrary to SDN neuroticism, studying for Step 1 during the dedicated study period is actually more than enough to do very well on the exam.

Calling it an either or situation is foolish on my part. I'm simply saying, when push comes to shove, I care much more about my step 1 score than my grades. My exams have random factoids from robbins thrown in that I can either a) know from reading it, which takes forever b) reason out due to other knowledge in area, without reading. I'm ok with not getting the ones specific enough where I'd have to read or I'm SOL, so that I can have more time to study the higher yield things.

 

[redpanda]

Calling it an either or situation is foolish on my part. I'm simply saying, when push comes to shove, I care much more about my step 1 score than my grades. My exams have random factoids from robbins thrown in that I can either a) know from reading it, which takes forever b) reason out due to other knowledge in area, without reading. I'm ok with not getting the ones specific enough where I'd have to read or I'm SOL, so that I can have more time to study the higher yield things.

This is all well and good until one figures out that the path from a good score on Step 1 to a "great" one (or on a shelf exam) is paved with that one extra bit of knowledge that darn well wasn't covered under the "high-yield" material. Just remember, a lot of those "high-yield" facts come up a ridiculous number of times through all the Step 1 prep materials, so if you haven't figured it out by the time you've seen like the 3th practice question where it all comes down to that one concept, you've got a problem.

 

[Wordead]

Calling it an either or situation is foolish on my part. I'm simply saying, when push comes to shove, I care much more about my step 1 score than my grades. My exams have random factoids from robbins thrown in that I can either a) know from reading it, which takes forever b) reason out due to other knowledge in area, without reading. I'm ok with not getting the ones specific enough where I'd have to read or I'm SOL, so that I can have more time to study the higher yield things.

A good step score is pretty dependent on how much minutiae is bouncing around in your head.

 

[alpinism]

A couple thoughts come to mind:

1) When pontificating about a major exam, people should include whether or not they have actually taken said exam in their post. I feel like a lot of the Step 1 advice comes from people who haven't even taken it yet, which makes about as much sense as me (MS4) trying to give advice to graduating residents on their upcoming specialty boards.

2) I've never met anyone who scored highly on step 1 argue that learning the material well for classes was not important. There seems to be a false dichotomy that says you can EITHER do well in classes OR do well on Step 1. You can either spend your Ms2 year pouring over FA, World, Goljian, Pathoma, et al, OR you can spend it studying class notes, Robbins, etc. This would be true if classes and steps tested entirely different material, but the reality is that they actually do test the same stuff. This is true regardless of whether you feel your school "teaches to the boards" or not; just because your exams have a handful of PhD minutiae questions does not mean that your school doesn't teach the same material. Those of us who have taken Step 1 can attest that there are definitely a number of minutiae questions on that exam too!

The key factor which throws people on Step exams and shelf exams is the apparent ambiguity in so many of the questions. The writers have taken great pains to create questions that require you to reason based on your accumulated knowledge base. These are often the questions people will describe as "there was no way I could have studied for that." These are the questions that leave people feeling defeated as they leave the testing center. These are the questions that force you to integrate across every source you've ever read, especially your classwork when you learned the concepts initially. Neither memorizing Robbins nor memorizing FA/W/P will be enough; you have to truly learn and incorporate all the material you can to the point where you start to see and understand the underlying patterns of path, pharm, physio, etc. They are going to ask you about things you've never seen or studied before and expect you to reason the answer based on the broader patterns you've learned.

That's not necessarily true.

There's a significant amount of variability between curriculums at different schools, hence why they even created the standardized step exams in the first place. Yeah you'll learn the same basic principles and core subjects at every school, but beyond that its up to the course director and even the lecturer that week as to what they want to include and leave out for each organ system. There's just too much information to include everything.

At the end of M2 I looked over the syllabus for each course and compared it to each chapter in FA and RR. On average, we didn't cover in class about 10 - 25% of what's in each FA/RR chapter. That's a ton of material from condensed review books. Instead we focused on different things in class (EBM, current research, clinical guidelines, public health, statistics, etc...) that wasn't in any review book and certainly wasn't on step 1.

I will agree that step 1 had its fair share of minutiae (especially biochemistry and genetics questions).

 

[FutureOncologist]

I think my class was like 224 or something like that. I know a gunner that honestly thought that if she didn't get a 260, she would only be matched into FM in bumf**k, MS. She made a 259, which prompted a running joke with a few friends of mine and me.

 

[PL198]

I think my class was like 224 or something like that. I know a gunner that honestly thought that if she didn't get a 260, she would only be matched into FM in bumf**k, MS. She made a 259, which prompted a running joke with a few friends of mine and me.

if someone thinks that they probably only have the intelligence to match into FM in BFE so that's probably where she ended up, even with a 259. I don't even understand how people that irrational function