Difference in First Aid from year to year...

[Bonesaw45]

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Hey everyone,

So I was wondering what how big the difference between First Aid for Step One is from edition to edition. I was told today that there was a difference, but I would like to start studying this summer. I'm not very good at short term memorization and prefer to learn things slowly over time. In this respect I plan to start converting all of First aid and BRS physiology into SuperMemo notecards (supermemo is a cool program you put the notecards in and it decides which ones you need the most work on). So over the next year I would do like 20 note cards a day.

I'm aware that by the end of second year we have, or should if your school teaches to boards, all of the information needed to do ~200-220 on the boards depending on ability and how hard you worked for the first 2 years. But my school does PBL and focuses on broader topics and they told us there are some specifics that they leave out for time purposes that we need to pick up before the boards, so I feel it necessary to do this with the boards.

Anyway thanks for any help

 

[Zweisamkeit]

Hey everyone,

So I was wondering what how big the difference between First Aid for Step One is from edition to edition. I was told today that there was a difference, but I would like to start studying this summer. I'm not very good at short term memorization and prefer to learn things slowly over time. In this respect I plan to start converting all of First aid and BRS physiology into SuperMemo notecards (supermemo is a cool program you put the notecards in and it decides which ones you need the most work on). So over the next year I would do like 20 note cards a day.

I'm aware that by the end of second year we have, or should if your school teaches to boards, all of the information needed to do ~200-220 on the boards depending on ability and how hard you worked for the first 2 years. But my school does PBL and focuses on broader topics and they told us there are some specifics that they leave out for time purposes that we need to pick up before the boards, so I feel it necessary to do this with the boards.

Anyway thanks for any help

Are you sure you want to start studying this summer? The general consensus at my school was to wait until 2nd year was well underway. Second year is much, much more high yield than first and besides, you're probably going to forget most of the study you study over the summer. Also...this is your last summer!!!!!!!!! Please, for your own sanity, do something a little more fun and enjoyable. If you want to do something that will boost your resume, do research.

To answer your question, there are little differences between each edition. I noticed that they took out a lot of clinical vignettes in the 2009 edition. I've also noticed some new diagrams and stuff. I haven't gone through it all yet and I never went through the entire 2008 edition so I can't comment on all of the differences. But you can do well on Step 1 if you use the previous year's edition. Plenty of people have done that and did well.

 

[masterofmonkeys]

From what I've been told they change it to reflect changes in USMLE content and emphasis.

Also, they change it so we feel forced to buy new ones rather than use hand me downs or buy used.

An out of date edition of a year or two is not going to matter very much. But 5 years might be a pretty big difference.

Also, if you're as hardcore (or trying to be hardcore) as your post makes you sound, you will quickly find that First Aid isn't enough to get your score as high as you want. You'll need to study specific subjects (especially path, pharm, and phys) and will want to use subject-specific review sources for them. FA might form a decent starting point or skeleton for your board review, but wouldn't even be enough to be considered the core. So if it's a year out of date, for you it'd matter even less than someone who just wants to do 'average'.