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Gunner Training?
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Okay thank you again. When did you start Uworld? Did u find urself thinking "I should have started earlier?"
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How does one customize the spaced repetition time intervals on GT for each grade? i.e., for a grade of 3, change it to X amount of days instead of the default. I remember reading somewhere that it was possible...
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Only thing I know about that is that gunneria, another SDN user, has asked about it a few times on here. The algorithm isn't simply a "3" is 15 days. It takes into account your recent ratings of that same question and customizes it based on that, thus even if you had the ability to make all 3's not come up again for 20 or 30 days, I can't see why you'd want to do that. You can of course customize an individual question's review schedule if you know you don't want to see it for x number of days. A blanket customization does not exist though.
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how do i do that individually like you said?
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I did read your post. But my bad. I assumed you were MS2 like lrkoehlehttp://forums.studentdoctor.net/member.php?u=218080 and preparing to write the boards in a couple of weeks. Figured you are at least doing Uworld now like everyone else, since its june already. Are you MS1 or 2? Im uber confused.
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There's a button called "CUSTOMIZE SCHEDULE" you can click. It's right under the numbers 1,2,3,4 when you're taking a quiz. Alternatively you can press "C" for the shortcut.
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2 ways to do it:
1) if your like me and you just use the keyboard to do GT (which I recommend, it's way faster). Then you read your question, come up with your answer, hit the right button on the directional pad (this brings up the answer card), then you hit the number key corresponding to your ranking of the question, then if you hold shift+enter it brings up the customizing option. Select when you want to see that question again and hit enter to move to the next question.
2) if you're using a mouse, answer the question, select your rating, then below where you rate a question you'll see in tiny print something that says "customize review schedule." Click that and you're good to go.
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I knew I was rocking the pharmacology section on GT, but my percent mastery on that section has risen to 101.4%...I guess they feel real gunners don't stop at 100%, so why should their percent mastery?
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Sorry to bother you guys again. I'll stop asking questions soon. Starting gt two days ago has been a bit of a steep learning curve. The only question I have is as follows. I thought gt was supposed to present questions to you based on how well you know them. Ie something rated a five won't be seen for maybe 2 weeks to a month whereas something rated a 1 will be seen the next day. So if this is correct, why is gt presenting questions I've rated a 5 in the same day? There seems to be two sets of questions in gt. one is in a drop down menu and goes by subjects (this is where i saw all the inappropriately repeated questions) and another which just says "accelerate your studies" and you pick how many days worth of questions you want to do. Am I supposed to be using both these question sets? The one which goes by subject (ie the one repeating unnecessary questions too soon) looks intense because it's just adding up every day. I have about 300-400 questions in there now. Will this go up to thousands, since it's ignoring my ratings? On the contrary, the one where I can select how many days in advance I want to study for only has 12 questions. This doesn't seem to make sense. Am I missing something here?
I hope my question makes sense. Sorry again for bugging you guys.
I hope my question makes sense. Sorry again for bugging you guys.
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Yeah, you're kind of doing it wrong...well not kind of, you're doing it wrong, but that's OK since you're just starting out. You should only do the questions listed under, "complete today's review questions for:" Under that heading usually says, "all subjects (X)" where the X in parenthesis corresponds to the number of questions you have for that day, as is shown on your "Personal Study Plan" calendar. Once you have done all of your daily questions, then it gives you the option to get ahead in your studies by doing questions from future days (like before a vacation or something you might use that).
Below that, is another drop down menu with the option to review all the questions in a given subject. You should pretty much never do that unless you want to in fact review all the questions for a given subject (e.g. before a final). That number will get absurdly high.
Does that make sense? When your calendar says zero for today's date, then you're finished. I hope that helps.
They REALLY need to make a youtube video guide. I'm betting a lot of people hit this wall, don't get how to use it, and drop the program.
And yeah listen to the post above. No wonder you had it rough. You were redoing questions you just banked over again.
And yeah listen to the post above. No wonder you had it rough. You were redoing questions you just banked over again.
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oh sweet, a new cytokines card, leave me alone GT!
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Thanks for your detailed response. This makes sense. I guess ill keep doing my daily review with 12 questions and hopefully it will have more questions soon.
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No problem. Don't worry, you'll have more than enough questions soon enough. Just take advantage of this early period to get ahead on banking like crazy. Then when the daily questions start to pile up you can throttle back on the banking and work on improving your mastery so your questions get spaced out further into the future. Also, try to stick to the 30 second max/question on your daily reviews; that's one thing I wish I had done starting out (would've taken less time for my ~50 daily questions and gotten more things banked...oh well).
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Agree with moving fast through the cards. I do GT in blocks of 50 with a 20 min stopwatch. What used to take >2hrs when I started was cut down to <1hr. Helped me keep up with classes.
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My bad bro, I asked them to add it. But they were missing a pretty important one. They still need to add IL-11 in for thrombocytopenia.
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holy crap!! Way to go dude!! So I'll do an update, I haven't posted here in a while. I reluctantly stopped GT a few weeks back, I was way too behind (~4000Qs piled up, I know it's bad
) from the final weeks of school. So I stopped @ 85% completed & 20% mastery (rated stuff lower n classes & everytime I played catchup from a GT hiatus), FWIW. I've mostly been doing UW, read most of BRS, Pathoma n FA during my 4wk study period. I found some great FA flashcards online so I've been hitting those too instead to GT (faster n more HY, IMO). Having said this, I think GT has helped me a ton and I started from a higher baseline than I would have otherwise!
I'm 50% done with UW avg. 73% 1st pass. I got 2 days to go, so I'm definitely not gonna finish UW, it's a huge shocker, i know...lol. I have only done the 2 UWSAs: UWSA1 234 (b4 I finished my review) n UWSA2: 256 (post-review). I plan to go thru my weak areas and review my UW incorrects before D-day. Maybe I'll do the free 150 tomorrow.
Yeah I've had to change my strategy on da fly, so it's a bit of a hodge-podge, but I try to be flexible/adaptible especially when reality demands it
! Looking ahead to Step 2, I plan to emulate ipizzy 😀, get my 'ish together and grind out GT nice n thoroughlyl!
Goodluck to all GT'ers, kick ass! BTW, any updates on step 2?
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This is my first week trying out GT. I started with microbio and I've run myself into a problem with pacing/strategy.
Here's what's been happening: when I bank a card, I might remember it well from short term memory and grade it a 4 for instance. Then I'll see the question days later and barely remember it, and if it's a really nit-picky detail question that's become lost in my brain I've might even end up grading it a 1 the second time!
Now hypothetically if I only had one card to learn, I could deal with this and let it play out over time, going from a grade of 4 to a 1 and then eventually getting better each time I see the card. However, because I'm banking new cards every day, I'm getting all those "short-term memory derived grade 4 questions" back with a vengeance and becoming discombobulated, especially since GT presents them in a random order. I'm currently at 10 cards banked with 10% mastery/banked. It would be more like 50% if I hadn't regraded so many cards a 1 on the second pass.
So I reset my microbio deck and am now thinking about trying something new.
TL;DR: I feel like I need to see a card sooner to reinforce it (even cards I grade a 4). And this is partly b/c I feel like the grades I give to the cards when I bank them initially are mostly based on a good short-term memory that skews the grading.
- So after looking at new cards, should I give it some time before I answer the questions to bank them? (to avoid short-term memory bias)
- Or perhaps I should manually set the review schedule for every question that I bank to appear the next day? (to confirm right away whether I actually know the stuff I graded a 4 the day before; this would become really time consuming)
- Or perhaps by default, when banking cards, grade everything a 1 or 2? so i'll simply see it sooner
Thanks!
Here's what's been happening: when I bank a card, I might remember it well from short term memory and grade it a 4 for instance. Then I'll see the question days later and barely remember it, and if it's a really nit-picky detail question that's become lost in my brain I've might even end up grading it a 1 the second time!
Now hypothetically if I only had one card to learn, I could deal with this and let it play out over time, going from a grade of 4 to a 1 and then eventually getting better each time I see the card. However, because I'm banking new cards every day, I'm getting all those "short-term memory derived grade 4 questions" back with a vengeance and becoming discombobulated, especially since GT presents them in a random order. I'm currently at 10 cards banked with 10% mastery/banked. It would be more like 50% if I hadn't regraded so many cards a 1 on the second pass.
So I reset my microbio deck and am now thinking about trying something new.
TL;DR: I feel like I need to see a card sooner to reinforce it (even cards I grade a 4). And this is partly b/c I feel like the grades I give to the cards when I bank them initially are mostly based on a good short-term memory that skews the grading.
- So after looking at new cards, should I give it some time before I answer the questions to bank them? (to avoid short-term memory bias)
- Or perhaps I should manually set the review schedule for every question that I bank to appear the next day? (to confirm right away whether I actually know the stuff I graded a 4 the day before; this would become really time consuming)
- Or perhaps by default, when banking cards, grade everything a 1 or 2? so i'll simply see it sooner
Thanks!
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They have IL-11/oprelvekin in the Heme/Onc section I believe. I just had a question about it yesterday...last time I'll ever see that question...:cry:
UW and Kaplan still often force you to dig deep to answer the questions. I wouldn't bother with Kaplan or UW until spring of second year for Kaplan and your dedicated step-I time for UW.
So I'll do an update, I haven't posted here in a while. I reluctantly stopped GT a few weeks back, I was way too behind (~4000Qs piled up, I know it's bad
I've mostly been doing UW, read most of BRS, Pathoma n FA during my 4wk study period. I found some great FA flashcards online so I've been hitting those too instead to GT (faster n more HY, IMO). Having said this, I think GT has helped me a ton and I started from a higher baseline than I would have otherwise!
I'm 50% done with UW avg. 73% 1st pass. I got 2 days to go, so I'm definitely not gonna finish UW, it's a huge shocker, i know...lol. I have only done the 2 UWSAs: UWSA1 234 (b4 I finished my review) n UWSA2: 256 (post-review). I plan to go thru my weak areas and review my UW incorrects before D-day. Maybe I'll do the free 150 tomorrow.
Yeah I've had to change my strategy on da fly, so it's a bit of a hodge-podge, but I try to be flexible/adaptible especially when reality demands it
Looking ahead to Step 2, I plan to emulate ipizzy 😀, get my 'ish together and grind out GT nice n thoroughlyl!
Goodluck to all GT'ers, kick ass! BTW, any updates on step 2?
4,000!?!? That's insane. I probably would've stopped then too. **** happened a couple times during my step-I study period and so I had a couple times where I had like 700-800 questions, but I managed to get them back under control (even though it took like a week). 4,000 just doesn't seem like a surmountable number though.
Don't stress about finishing UW, I'm only like 2/3 through it, and this past week I spent far more time doing my final run through of FA (which is also coincidentally my first pass through it) than doing UW. I figure between UW, Kaplan, & practice NBME's I've done like 4,500 questions anyways, so why stress over a couple hundred more? Shoot, add in GT questions and I've done over 10,000, even though GT questions are hardly step-I style (for the most part).
With 2 days left as well, I too can't help but wonder about GT for step-2. When my wife asks what I'm going to do after step-I, I keep telling her I have to keep up with my GT, which she hates (probably cuz on a near daily basis I tell her something like, "but I still have to do my GT!" so she's ready for GT to be finished).
I almost never rated a new card as a 4 for the reasons you listed above, unless I truly knew it backwards and forwards without having looked at the card. If you rate it a 1 or a 2 I believe you'll see it again in 2 or 3 days, so that should test if you know it because of immediate recall or if you really remembered it. Sometimes I'd see something in 2 days and question whether or not I'd ever actually banked a card with that info on it, but through the magic of GT, I now can recall most of the stuff in there.
This happened to me all the time. I would rank questions from new cards at 4 or 5 and then 10-14 days later it was if I had never seen them. If you could remember things 2 weeks out just from one repetition, you wouldn't need GT! Just the experience of seeing things that you've forgetten makes you remember them better. Just keep doing what you're doing and after lots of repetition it will stick.
Also, I wouldn't bother trying to make things show up sooner or try to game the ratings system; just honestly rank the questions according to how you remember them. Give it more than 2 weeks and *then* see if you need to modify your ratings strategy. I think if you see something every 1-2 days right off the bat, 1) you'll have way too many questions piling up faster than you can keep up and 2) you're really not pushing yourself to get beyond short term recall anyway.
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Just messing. The immuno cards have just been killing me - lots rolling over on a day to day basisThis is my philosophy as well
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Thanks for the advice! 👍
Here's a follow-up question: Do you recommend using the GT feature to retake the quiz for those questions that were graded 1s and 2s?
It would be nice to use that feature to actively reinforce, but my concern is that my short-term recall will help me get those questions right and lead to a grading bias once again. In other words, what was graded a 1 initially should ideally stay a 1 but if I remember it on the second pass review right away and give it a 3, I'd only be kidding myself and shooting myself in the foot. Unless I "game the grading scheme" on these second passes and give it the same score I gave it before... but who am I kidding, I prob won't have time to do these retake quizzes anyway when school's busy
Here's a follow-up question: Do you recommend using the GT feature to retake the quiz for those questions that were graded 1s and 2s?
It would be nice to use that feature to actively reinforce, but my concern is that my short-term recall will help me get those questions right and lead to a grading bias once again. In other words, what was graded a 1 initially should ideally stay a 1 but if I remember it on the second pass review right away and give it a 3, I'd only be kidding myself and shooting myself in the foot. Unless I "game the grading scheme" on these second passes and give it the same score I gave it before... but who am I kidding, I prob won't have time to do these retake quizzes anyway when school's busy
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Maybe if you're SUPER bored and literally have NOTHING else to do, then do the retake quiz. Otherwise, I don't see the point and I never bothered with them. You have a year to hammer things into your brain, which is more than enough time for the GT system to do that. You're better off banking new material with that time.
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1) do you guys feel the cell bio (in biochemostry) section The Cell is lacking i.e. In the detail you learn in med school, heck even AP bio...it seems a bit too simplifie but im not sure if we need all that depth or if all we need is to kow disease relevance as opposed to normal indepth cell architecture and processes.
2) how do you guys cover your base for 1st year histo for normal histo, do you use shotgun or blue histology?
2) how do you guys cover your base for 1st year histo for normal histo, do you use shotgun or blue histology?
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For the GT card on passive and active immunity, in regards to bacterial antigenic diversity, GT says it can occur through gene mutation, recombination, and switching. I've had trouble finding a concise summary of gene switching. Does anyone have a good reference?
TYIA!
TYIA!
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good question regarding shotgun vs blue histology...Unfortunately my histology is very weak and I've been thinking of a good way to review it as well. Any feedback from those who have used these two resources and/or know of a good way to review histology? Thanks in advance!
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Good luck to lrkoehle tomorrow. He's always helped people on this thread and worked his ass off for this test.
Good luck bro. You're going to do very well!
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👍👍👍👍
Thanks guys. I'm hoping to represent the GT community well tomorrow.
Then the day after my exam I start my re-entry program...kind of like re-introducing an animal into the wild, I will be slowly rehabilitated and reeducated on how to function in society after spending 6+ weeks in almost complete isolation. Honestly, there was a 2 and a half week stretch where I only left my neighborhood one time...I also went a month without driving my car, which is probably for the best. Had a cop seen my disheveled looking ass driving a car he no doubt would've assumed I had stolen it. The poor hygiene and blood shot eyes (from staring at the computer all day) would've no doubt landed me some pretty serious drug charges...
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Good luck dude 👍
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Thanks for the well-wishes, with the work I've put in the past year, I sure wreck this exam and maybe even get some people at the NBME fired for writing and exam that some one managed to get a 285 on...🙄
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How many cards are you guys banking a day over the summer? I started banking 20 a day for the last few days but it became too much. I only banked 15 yesterday, I'm at 10 today and sick of it so far. I was hoping to bank all the basic science before ms2. But there is some stuff that we haven't learned (even in classes like biochem and immuno). interestingly, we have already covered all the path cards and in similar detail to what's in gt. I don't like learning things in gt for the first time and I don't want to read FA. I'm supposed to be enjoying my summer lol
You don't need to be banking at all this summer. You can do it all during MS2. And unfortunately there will be things you end up teaching yourself no matter what source you study from.
GT is painful but it pays off if you manage it.
GT is painful but it pays off if you manage it.
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or you could just dick around for the whole summer because memorizing **** a year before you have to know it is going to only result in you forgetting everything a year from now.
you are NOT going to have time to review first year material on GT throughout the year/its a giant waste of time. You will be (or atleast you should be) focused on mastering pathology/your other second year courses throughout 2nd year, not doing GT review cards for first year material.
I find that pre-first years/first years greatly over estimate their time/ability to handle the material in medschool. unless you are a A+ student getting 95+ on everyone of your tests, you did not spend enough time studying, & having to review **** you banked in GT over the summer throughout the school year 2nd year is only going to result in you spending less time studying for whats important @ the time.
you are NOT going to have time to review first year material on GT throughout the year/its a giant waste of time. You will be (or atleast you should be) focused on mastering pathology/your other second year courses throughout 2nd year, not doing GT review cards for first year material.
I find that pre-first years/first years greatly over estimate their time/ability to handle the material in medschool. unless you are a A+ student getting 95+ on everyone of your tests, you did not spend enough time studying, & having to review **** you banked in GT over the summer throughout the school year 2nd year is only going to result in you spending less time studying for whats important @ the time.
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As I recall, he's the guy who started doing GT during boards prep & was going at a pace of like 4% banked per day. Which is like 40 cards or adding 400 new questions a day. Commendable but highly not recommended & defeats the purpose.
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Finished that mother ****er!!! Just got out of the interrogation room at the NBME headquarters...they had agents waiting for me when I walked out from my exam; wanted to know how I got a 100% on that thing if I didn't cheat. I told them it's all GT baby! 😎
More seriously though, it wasn't too bad at all (though definitely some curve balls as you'd expect). Also, there was at least 2-3 questions that I had on my exam that I only got because of GT. I didn't see them in my classes, didn't see them in FA (big surprise there 🙄), and never saw them on UW or Kaplan qbanks either. I can honestly say my performance on that exam was dramatically better thanks to GT. I'm absolutely not predicting a 260+ or even a 250+ (I'm really in too much of a daze to think about that crap anyways; my score will be what it will be at this point), but I give the system/structure provided by GT a lot of credit. Finishing up banking a month or two earlier may have helped, but it doesn't matter now.
Anyways, I feel like I've gotten to kind of know some of you guys from this thread, so I wanted to come touch base with you here first. If you trust in the GT system and put in the work it requires, I think your knowledge base will put you in position to be successful. Now off to go work out...if I can remember how after not being to the gym in over a month...😡).
More seriously though, it wasn't too bad at all (though definitely some curve balls as you'd expect). Also, there was at least 2-3 questions that I had on my exam that I only got because of GT. I didn't see them in my classes, didn't see them in FA (big surprise there 🙄), and never saw them on UW or Kaplan qbanks either. I can honestly say my performance on that exam was dramatically better thanks to GT. I'm absolutely not predicting a 260+ or even a 250+ (I'm really in too much of a daze to think about that crap anyways; my score will be what it will be at this point), but I give the system/structure provided by GT a lot of credit. Finishing up banking a month or two earlier may have helped, but it doesn't matter now.
Anyways, I feel like I've gotten to kind of know some of you guys from this thread, so I wanted to come touch base with you here first. If you trust in the GT system and put in the work it requires, I think your knowledge base will put you in position to be successful. Now off to go work out...if I can remember how after not being to the gym in over a month...😡).
