I'm reserving the final week for nothing but First Aid plus a read-through of the most pared-down, essential crammable material for each subject. This includes, on top of First Aid, Katzung's "Key Words for Key Drugs," the Levinson charts for Micro, and Goljan's HY100 Notes, plus flipping through RR and read those "blue boxes" and look at the pictures.
Tried to time it so that I had finished World and gone through the missed questions with a week to spare, the idea being that questions are extremely useful to learn the way in which concepts are presented and to recognize the algorithms and "traps" of USMLE testing. But by the final week, the time it takes to go through a question and read the alternative explanations is not nearly as efficient as reading through long lists of associations and cramming the random charts (Think Microbiology Viruses, Think De Novo Purine synthesis, Think the clotting cascade) that always seem to fall out of our heads, basically jogging the memory of everything you've learned in the past weeks/months and loading the f*ck up on your short-term recall. This also includes reading through a list of explanations to missed questions (I took notes on questions I missed on Kaplan QBank, which I completed throughout the year in lieu of, uh, attending class, which I've been reading throughout the study period-- for the final week before the exam, I have a list of missed questions from WikiTestPrep's modest free online bank. Point is, if you miss a question, you should make sure that you see it again in some form at least once).
We'll see how that approach fares in a few weeks!
