Step I GT = USMLERx?

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ar2388

ar2388

rads resident
15+ Year Member
Hi everyone!

just a quick question.
I currently have gunner training and was planning on potentially getting UsmleRx and UWorld during 2nd year. I was wondering if GT is really like the UsmleRx and I shouldnt bother wasting money on that and just get a longer UWorld subscription.
my original plan:
- get UsmleRx at the beginning of 2nd year and use it with GT
- get UWorld 3 months before my exam.


Would appreciate any thoughts!
Thanks!!
 
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Rx is a question bank that constantly references First Aid material, reinforcing it. I thought GT was just a knowledge base of some sort with flash cards and other stuff.

I used Rx to go along with 2nd year classes and I thought it was fantastic in that usage. You'll have gone through First Aid extremely thoroughly before you even begin your dedicated step 1 study period.
 
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C5toC9.. Ive been doing GT lightly this summer and also reading first aid very lightly and there definitely seems to be a correlation between the material and the book..
and GT's price is much nicer than Rx LOL
 
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I tried both GT in the fall and Rx/Flash Facts in the spring last year and found that I liked the Rx/Flash Facts combo better. The thing that frustrated me about GT is that if you're trying to use it along side your classes to study, the spaced learning made it impossible to immediately re-quiz yourself on flash cards you already banked, and cards from previous blocks that had nothing to do with what I was currently studying would pop up for "review". It's like my exam is tomorrow, no I don't want to wait 5 days to see that question again. The question bank questions were okay for studying for tests, but they weren't really in the clinical format that the USMLE questions are, so they weren't great practice for the real thing.

While UWorld is the gold standard for test questions, I felt USMLERx was a much closer approximation than GT. I also liked that the Flash cards had one fact/card instead of an entire topic, and that you could pull up a given set of flash cards whenever you wanted. It also exactly mirrored FA so it was great for both studying for class and covering the stuff in FA.
 
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Been using GT for a few weeks now, and I like it. I agree the spaced learning can be annoying but I think it will work out well for long term memory. It's not designed for cramming.

Some of the flashcards/explanations could be arranged better. It's not perfect. One thing I hate is when I repeatedly get the same question wrong time and time again hahaha. This usually happens on material that I am learning from GT for the first time (as opposed to other topics that I covered in class and am now just using GT as review).

I am trying to "bank" everything I learned in M1 but there are sooooooo many cards/questions. **** is ridiculous.
 
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Here's my take on all this stuff. USMLERX is awesome to study FA with. I'd say don't start studying until January at the earliest. I mean you could start earlier, but it's pretty much a waste of time *PARTY IT UP!!!* So what I did was I got USMLERX and the cards which were a total waste. I did 6 months for USMLERX. The questions are all "reversed engineered" if you want to put it like that since it seems like they find the fact they want to test and try to give you little details so you have to memorize FA verbatim. Also it's a lot easier than UWORLD. I think I averaged around 85% near the end for USMLERX whereas I was doing about 75% in UWORLD. (fyi average is around 63% for USMLERX near the end and UWORLD is more like 56%). I think uworld is better for after you've studyed a decent amount otherwise it's kind of a waste so I just did 1 month for that and finished it and the 2 diagnostic tests and some NBME tests.

Oh yeah, don't be a gunner and relax. A lot of the people I was studying with were also bombing practice scores around 240+ and we all started studying mainly in the last month and a half. I made it through FA once before that and I read through 1/3 of goljan and listened to him once before my heavy studying went down. FYI I pretty much just slack off in class and barely passed and I was still able to be hitting 250+ on practice tests. First aid is everything. The other resources are minimally important. Just don't waste your only summer studying for 1 dumb test.

The main crunch is the 6 day sprint to the end so study a good 8-10 hours a day, and the last 6 days I started to hit about 14 hours or so.
 
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So I just took a look at the USMLERx site and see that there's the qbank and flashcards. Have people used the flashcards/what do they think? I'm going to use the qbank throughout MS2 and transition to UWorld for step studying.
 
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