does a mediocre shelf exam mean anything?

[mcatsucksss]

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so i just got back my scores for a bunch of shelf exams (path, micro, pharm) and i am slightly above "national average" for all of them. from what i understand though, most people dont take these tests very seriously. i saw alot of people in my class fill in their name and a few random answers and walk out of the test in 15 minutes. people doing this at other schools must also bring down the national avg. so my question is, with under 3 weeks left until my real test, is doing average on a shelf kind of predictive of doing average on step 1 (220)???

 

[speedyk]

so i just got back my scores for a bunch of shelf exams (path, micro, pharm) and i am slightly above "national average" for all of them. from what i understand though, most people dont take these tests very seriously. i saw alot of people in my class fill in their name and a few random answers and walk out of the test in 15 minutes. people doing this at other schools must also bring down the national avg. so my question is, with under 3 weeks left until my real test, is doing average on a shelf kind of predictive of doing average on step 1 (220)???

I agree with what you said about some people not taking them seriously so I would expect that it would overestimate your performance generally. I scored much higher on the shelf exams than the NBME practice ones but haven't taken the real deal yet.

 

[MrAgreeable]

I agree with what you said about some people not taking them seriously so I would expect that it would overestimate your performance generally. I scored much higher on the shelf exams than the NBME practice ones but haven't taken the real deal yet.

I'll go the other way. I didn't really give two $hizzles about my "practice" shelves and have done monumentally better on practice tests (Which is 230's so that tells you how "monumentally" bad I did on the practices where I took 200 questions in 45 mins but hey, I had my Fantasy baseball draft to research which failed when I picked Ian Kinsler in the second round. No problem though because I made out BIG TIME with Neil Walker in the 18th and Justin Masterson in the 21st. GO BUCCOS!).

 

[mcatsucksss]

i dont even understand what you just said lol

 

[MrAgreeable]

i dont even understand what you just said lol

Oh sorry, haha, you can easily rebound from a bad shelf. Just doing qbanks and getting used to the questions helps a whole lot.

 

[fahimaz7]

For every school that doesn't take them seriously, there's another one who has it as a large % of their grades, which has them doing lots of prep. I think it's about spot on for averages.

 

[mcatsucksss]

ok thanks a lot

 

[speedyk]

For every school that doesn't take them seriously, there's another one who has it as a large % of their grades, which has them doing lots of prep. I think it's about spot on for averages.

But on the real deal everyone is trying so I don't think so.