COMBANK CE2 Toughness

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.

Bacchus

Full Member
Moderator Emeritus
15+ Year Member
Joined
Apr 28, 2007
Messages
21,728
Reaction score
3,121
I've been doing COMBANK questions for a bit of time now and barely meeting the passing mark. However, my exams to date have been higher than my peers. What's everyone's opinion on the level of difficulty compared to the actual CE?

Members don't see this ad.
 
I've been doing COMBANK questions for a bit of time now and barely meeting the passing mark. However, my exams to date have been higher than my peers. What's everyone's opinion on the level of difficulty compared to the actual CE?

I'm also curious about this if anyone knows. to add to her question, are the questions on the actual CE as short as they are on combank? uworld questions are way longer.
 
I take CE in a week and a half so I can give a better opinion then, but I think COMBANK sucks balls for Level 2 CE. It was money for Level 1 but I couldn't stand how poorly written (bad grammar, misspellings, etc) questions are on COMBANK. Their explanations are bad and I felt like I was commenting every time I did a 50 question block. Half the time their explanation is along the lines of:
Choice A - wrong because choice B is right
Choice C - wrong because choice B is right
Choice D - wrong because choice B is right
Choice E - wrong because choice B is right

How is that helpful for studying? I was doing pretty crappy (high 50's, low 60's) on it even though I easily beat the average on every NBME shelf. I'm doing COMQUEST now and it seems to be a better qbank. My scores are more on line with my knowledge as well as my UW scores.

Even though COMBANK has 900 more questions, there are so many word for word repeats in the bank that I think it eliminates at least 2-300 of them. It seemed like every time I did a set of 50, I had two 2 questions sets that were almost identically the same.
 
I'm also curious about this if anyone knows. to add to her question, are the questions on the actual CE as short as they are on combank? uworld questions are way longer.

I'm guessing they are representative since that's how Level 1 questions were. Short stems with minimal amount of extraneous information. COMQUEST is the same way. I'm also seeing the sets of 3-5 questions at the end of a 50 question block, just like Level 1.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
I take CE in a week and a half so I can give a better opinion then, but I think COMBANK sucks balls for Level 2 CE. It was money for Level 1 but I couldn't stand how poorly written (bad grammar, misspellings, etc) questions are on COMBANK. Their explanations are bad and I felt like I was commenting every time I did a 50 question block. Half the time their explanation is along the lines of:
Choice A - wrong because choice B is right
Choice C - wrong because choice B is right
Choice D - wrong because choice B is right
Choice E - wrong because choice B is right

How is that helpful for studying? I was doing pretty crappy (high 50's, low 60's) on it even though I easily beat the average on every NBME shelf. I'm doing COMQUEST now and it seems to be a better qbank. My scores are more on line with my knowledge as well as my UW scores.

Even though COMBANK has 900 more questions, there are so many word for word repeats in the bank that I think it eliminates at least 2-300 of them. It seemed like every time I did a set of 50, I had two 2 questions sets that were almost identically the same.

I completely agree with COMBANK sucking balls. I am doing both COMBANK and COMQUEST. COMQUEST seems to have better questions with more info and better explanation. I have no idea what the real thing will be like. My guess RANDOM AS HELL. :laugh:
 
COMBANK is written by students vs. COMQUEST is written strictly by physicians. The main difference that I noticed between the two was the COMBANK had more "obscure" questions vs. COMQUEST focuses more on the high-yield topics. As crappy as some of the questions are on COMBANK, I have a good feeling that those questions that seem to come out of left field are real COMLEX questions that writers had on their exam. I have heard on more than one occasion of people getting repeat questions verbatim on their actual COMLEX exam that they had on COMBANK.

In all honesty though, I personally didn't think either Qbank was reflective of the actual exam. COMLEX is such a crap shoot as I'm sure many of you know from Level 1. 30% of the questions cannot be found in any review book and I even had a difficult time finding the answers anywhere else. During the middle of the exam I thought to myself, why the hell did I even study for this thing? I think the best thing to do is just know your OMM since those questions seem to be weighted more. I made sure to study the OMM portion really well and ended up breaking 650 so that'd be my suggestion to people.
 
COMBANK is written by students vs. COMQUEST is written strictly by physicians. The main difference that I noticed between the two was the COMBANK had more "obscure" questions vs. COMQUEST focuses more on the high-yield topics. As crappy as some of the questions are on COMBANK, I have a good feeling that those questions that seem to come out of left field are real COMLEX questions that writers had on their exam. I have heard on more than one occasion of people getting repeat questions verbatim on their actual COMLEX exam that they had on COMBANK.

In all honesty though, I personally didn't think either Qbank was reflective of the actual exam. COMLEX is such a crap shoot as I'm sure many of you know from Level 1. 30% of the questions cannot be found in any review book and I even had a difficult time finding the answers anywhere else. During the middle of the exam I thought to myself, why the hell did I even study for this thing? I think the best thing to do is just know your OMM since those questions seem to be weighted more. I made sure to study the OMM portion really well and ended up breaking 650 so that'd be my suggestion to people.


:thumbup:
 
Top