Finding practice questions for pre-clinical years

[biodaychemnight]

Hello SDN,

I'm looking for some advice on practice questions. My med school has weekly quizzes (not graded) that are supposed to gauge our progress. The problem is, there are no practice questions to prepare for the quiz. I have my first final coming up next week, and would like to know if there are other resources for practice problems.

I was wondering if getting a kaplan q bank would be helpful? I heard uworld is the best for qbanks, so I want to save that for next year when I'm closer to step 1.

TL;DR Have any of you found qbanks helpful during your first year?

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[mhagerman]

Hello SDN,

I'm looking for some advice on practice questions. My med school has weekly quizzes (not graded) that are supposed to gauge our progress. The problem is, there are no practice questions to prepare for the quiz. I have my first final coming up next week, and would like to know if there are other resources for practice problems.

I was wondering if getting a kaplan q bank would be helpful? I heard uworld is the best for qbanks, so I want to save that for next year when I'm closer to step 1.

TL;DR Have any of you found qbanks helpful during your first year?

Not sure what kind of subjects you're studying right now, but I've been using BRS Biochemistry and found it very helpful. Lippincott's Q&A for the same subject was also good.

 

[Redpancreas]

Hello SDN,

I'm looking for some advice on practice questions. My med school has weekly quizzes (not graded) that are supposed to gauge our progress. The problem is, there are no practice questions to prepare for the quiz. I have my first final coming up next week, and would like to know if there are other resources for practice problems.

I was wondering if getting a kaplan q bank would be helpful? I heard uworld is the best for qbanks, so I want to save that for next year when I'm closer to step 1.

TL;DR Have any of you found qbanks helpful during your first year?

UWorld and Kaplan are useless. I remember my friend showing us some questions as an M1 and we got all the questions (even those specially tagged and Physiology/Biochemistry) wrong and we were all pretty good and working on it as a team.

Does the Rapid Review/BRS series have any? I'd imagine those would be something at least?

 

[Osteoth]

Looking back I feel like it was much more important for me to memorize things year 1-2 than it was to quiz myself. Especially first year questions are really just rote memorization for the most part.

 

[njtrimed]

What are you working on now? I agree that BRS has good questions for biochemistry. I also like their physiology questions, although they’re on the easier side. West has excellent questions for pulmonary physiology. Gray’s is great for second and third order anatomy questions. If your curriculum is systems-based, Kaplan questions are good, and a lot of people like USMLE-Rx and MedBullets (I haven’t tried either of the latter two myself).

 

[biodaychemnight]

Thank you to all who replied! My school is systems based, but this first part was just the foundation unit. Someone commented that it's a lot of rote memorization (which I hate), so I guess I'll just have to start making tons and tons of flash cards. I'll look into the BRS books that were recommended.

 

[Kisangani]

Not sure how you can have a final exam already.......but in order of helpfulness (for exam prep and so forth) my list would have to be Pretest, BRS, UWorld, Kaplan. PDFs are readily available online and many of your classmates likely already have them and could send them to you. UWorld is probably the best for STEP 1 study, but many of the questions may be out of scope for what you will be tested on for a routine subject based exam in medical school. Guyton Hall and Robbins are also good for physiology and pathology practice, respectively.

 

[Goro]

Hello SDN,

I'm looking for some advice on practice questions. My med school has weekly quizzes (not graded) that are supposed to gauge our progress. The problem is, there are no practice questions to prepare for the quiz. I have my first final coming up next week, and would like to know if there are other resources for practice problems.

I was wondering if getting a kaplan q bank would be helpful? I heard uworld is the best for qbanks, so I want to save that for next year when I'm closer to step 1.

TL;DR Have any of you found qbanks helpful during your first year?

ANY question bank can be helpful.

try googling "[subject] practice questions". For example, here's what I found for histology:

Histology-World!
Basic Histology Quiz
WebAnatomy Histology
Histology Lab Photo Quiz Flashcards | Quizlet

 

[failedatlife]

Aren't there NMBE shelf exams for Anatomy, Physiology, etc if I remember correctly. Get RX and set it to those sections specifically. You are doing the right thing, remember focus on this test 100% of the time...don't let anything else distract you.

 

[doyouhaveaflag]

For pathology questions (1200 of them I think), this book is gold (and also good step 1 prep in my opinion):

 

[ciestar]

BRS for physio and Guyton and Hall.

Lippincott's biochemistry flash cards are great!

But in general, BRS is full of practice questions and I'd recommend it.

 

[guytakingboards]

Are you more worried about learning the material or doing well in your class? At my med school, the academic support center often had old tests/quizzes available for students to get more practice questions or better insight into the types of questions they would see on the tests.

The board review stuff may not even come close to the scope of your school's tests.