Step II Consensus on completing UWorld questions

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wonderbread12

Full Member
10+ Year Member
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Just wonder what people think about doing questions after finishing up some reading..... is it best to do questions on topics you just read about or to just do a block of completely random questions regardless of what you read up on for the day? I'm currently going through MTB with Uworld as supplement question bank.
 
If your study plan involves two passes do the first by specialty and the second random. I did it by specialty throughout the year studying for shelf exams and then went back and did it again on random and found it to be helpful. If only doing it once I think its more personal preference.
 
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random is probably harder because you're not focusing on one subject area at a time. plus random is how the real deal is, so I take the approach of simulating as close as possible to how it's going to be.
 
If you are trying to learn then on topic worked for me, since you can get multiple Qs on the same topic presented different ways (and you can take notes "en masse" on a particular topic)

Yes, it may give you a false sense of higher % correct, but I don't know of any correlation b/w UW scores & actual scores (coming from someone who scored < 10% percentile on EVER ITSE, freaked out my chair & then rocked the ABIM)

By this time you should know what works for you so go with that, although I will say that if you are trying to work on timing/simulation of real test then it has to be random, timed
 
If you are going to do 2 passes (one being during the year with shelves) then do it by subject. Otherwise, random-timed is the way to go if you want to use the qbank as both a learning tool and assessment tool. Otherwise, it's just a learning tool IMO.