COMLEX Level 3

[weezynation]

So I am a 4th year DO student going into Psych and am hoping to avoid taking the new 2-day COMLEX 3 that begins in 2018. Since an intern year in Psych has 6 months straight on-service and 6 off-service (3 months IM, 2 month Neuro, 1 month EM), if I end up having to do the on-service months first, I will finish them at the end of December 2017. So to avoid taking the new COMLEX 3, that would mean taking it within the first 6 months of residency meaning I will not have rotated through the off-service months that will definitely be much more helpful for COMLEX 3 than my intern year psych months. My question is, is it possible to study hard during my first 6 months of residency with combank, savarese, and MTB and pass COMLEX 3 without having done my off-service months? Or is this too risky? Obviously this wouldn't be an issue if I get to do my off-service rotations first, but that is not guaranteed. Thanks for the help.

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[blastoff]

any news on this?

 

[Petypet]

its doable. don't worry about the rotations helping you for the exam. biggest thing is that some programs don't let you take step 3 early so make sure your program is ok with it.

 

[Subtracterall XR]

There is also an official COMSAE practice test for Level 3. You can just study, take it, and if you're in passing range, take the exam. My suspicion is that if you did okay on Level 1 and 2 you can take Level 3 cold and pass it. It has a 96% first-time pass rate. It's not an easy test, per se, the bar to pass is just really really low. I am also a psych resident, and I can tell you my experience.

Basically, I completed intern year. I am at a rigorous academic program, but did not do a huge amount of outside reading. Then I purchased Combank and completed it. I repeated the ones I got wrong, and paid a little extra attention to pediatrics and OB/GYN. Maybe 4000 questions total? The day before the exam I skimmed through the green book, but at this point I was so deeply sick of OMM that I may as well have not even done that for how much I retained.

This was massively, massively overkill. My score was in the 800s, and I am historically a merely good but not great student (Level 1 in the mid-500s, Level 2 in the low-600s). To me, this indicates that my preparation was excessive. If I did it over again, I would probably give myself 2 weeks to do as many questions as possible and then just take it.