Dedicated Study Period Length and Score Improvement

[spicysoup55]

Hi all,

Trying to decide how long my dedicated study period should be. Could you please help by answering:

1) How many weeks you put into your dedicated study period.
2) Your baseline score at the beginning of the study period.
3) The improvement in your score from the baseline to your actual test score.

Hopefully this can help people figure out how many weeks to put into the study period to get the score they want. Thanks.

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[malin]

Your dedicated study period length does not matter as much as how much effort you put in during year 2, in my opinion.

I took 5 weeks; started at low 240s and scored in the low 250s on the real thing. During the semester I did all of UWorld, Brosencephalon, consolidating UW into FA, etc etc. During my dedicated I just read through my FA very carefully (with all of UW written in it), did UWorld a 2nd time, listened to all of Pathoma, and did every single NBME question (yes, all 2500+ of them).

If I didn't do all of UWorld during my semester (and started it during dedicated), then I would have perhaps done 6-7 weeks of dedicated. But b/c I did all the hard work before dedicated, I took a very short dedicated study period, and really just used the shorter period to cram. If you take too long and don't do spaced repetition with the information you learned at the beginning, you may forget some of it.

Some schools have their students take anywhere from 4-10 weeks off. It really depends how hard you work before dedicated, in my opinion.

 

[gwooooooooooooooooooood]

1) How many weeks you put into your dedicated study period.
- 6, but if i focused more it could've been 5 i feel, would not recommend less than 5

2) Your baseline score at the beginning of the study period.
- didn't do one, but i did usmleworld tests at end of week 5 (of 6) and got 240 and 260

3) The improvement in your score from the baseline to your actual test score.
- tests at end of week 5 estimated my score pretty well, 240 and 260, actual score 256

 

[badasshairday]

i'd say 5 weeks. I took 5.5 weeks. I feel like I peaked at 5 weeks then I just started forgetting stuff as I inserted more in my brain the last 3-4 days. I scored in 90%tile in my time back in 2010.