Gunner Training?

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Ehh pahways are pretty 2D and have a reasonable progression plus biochems been taught in ugrad and so a bunch of it is review....gen micro and clinical with all the path, dx, tx just sucks because its unique for each bug
 
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So I know some of you were interested in seeing how I did on step-1, and I found out right before clinic earlier this morning (at 11 a.m. EST exactly). My score is 245. My NBME practice scores on 7, 11, 12, & 13 were 254, 252, 254, & 259, respectively. I have stuff this afternoon, so I can't type a long post now but I'll try to come back later.
 
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lrkoehle said:
So I know some of you were interested in seeing how I did on step-1, and I found out right before clinic earlier this morning (at 11 a.m. EST exactly). My score is 245. My NBME practice scores on 7, 11, 12, & 13 were 254, 252, 254, & 259, respectively. I have stuff this afternoon, so I can't type a long post now but I'll try to come back later.
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I thought of you a few hours ago and wondered why you hadn't posted (im not a creeper lol). Figured you were busy on wards. That's a great score buddy!!! Are you happy with it? Please post soon with some general tips and comment on how/if gt helped!!
 
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Gunneria said:
100 percent banked in micro! Micro, which is like 15% of Gt is easily the worst subject to have banled...too much info and straight up blind memorization
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Congrats!!!. I can't bank micro for $h!t!! I don't like all the drugs it keeps asking. I stopped banking after parasites. We weren't taught drugs in ms1 and I hate learning drugs. I'll resume banking micro with classes in 3 weeks when we start learning treatments. Can't believe my break is over.
 
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GTP said:
Congrats!!!. I can't bank micro for $h!t!! I don't like all the drugs it keeps asking. I stopped banking after parasites. We weren't taught drugs in ms1 and I hate learning drugs. I'll resume banking micro with classes in 3 weeks when we start learning treatments. Can't believe my break is over.
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Man, micro was my favorite part of GT! Lol, somethjng much be wrong with me...

If you have clinical micro made rediculously simple, try usin that to learn then bank the cards... Antibiotics is poorly taught at my school, so basically had to learn that way anyway 🙂 goodluck!
 
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Great job by pizzy and lrk. I'm sure both will do well 3rd year + match whatever.

I'm taking an SDN hiatus for a few months, just wanted to say congrats. Good luck to all the gunners on their prep.
 
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JackShephard MD said:
Great job by pizzy and lrk. I'm sure both will do well 3rd year + match whatever.

I'm taking an SDN hiatus for a few months, just wanted to say congrats. Good luck to all the gunners on their prep.
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Yes, congrats on your work guys - it paid off. Also, thank you for your help - you've both offered a lot of good advice here. I'll be SDN-hiatusing as well, by deactivating this account actually! Spending a bit too much time looking into how to prep still when I honestly have a fine plan laid out. Need to just start actually doing that plan! After I get 2nd year under control, I may reincarnate under another name 🙂

Right after I finish this set of review cards, I'll post a little info about where I ended up in GT going into second year (I still have about 2 weeks til the year starts, and maybe 10 more cards to bank, but close enough).
 
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I'm in a traditional curriculum, so this info is probably only really beneficial to those who are as well

1st semester was gross/embryo and histo, second semester was phys/biochem/neuro. Started GT after 1st block of second semester, and only banked information from that semester during that semester. I think I finished the semester at ~30% banked. During the summer, I filled in almost anywhere I had skipped during the semester and added on all the first semester material. I also watched pathoma lectures once through during the summer (banked some of the basic path stuff from the first couple pathoma lectures, but not beyond that), read the immuno section of Levinson and banked the normal immunology stuff (none of the immune suppression drugs, immune deficiencies, etc.), and read a tiny bit of the introductory micro chapters in Levinson and tried to do a couple of the micro cards (only did maybe 10 total - crap sucks hard).

I do recommend starting GT at latest over the summer before 2nd year - I can't imagine how the people who have already posted in this thread managed to get through all of GT during second year. It is a serious time sink. I do think it's worth the time however. Also, being built on first aid, a lot of the cards from 1st year stuff integrate some pathology in there that you won't have seen before (and sometimes pharm/micro as well). I just sucked it up and looked at it as hopefully making 2nd year a touch easier. I can't say if that's the case at this point obviously.

Below are a couple of pics - one is of my GT homepage so you can see what the daily review card #'s were like (I'm hoping to get the daily around 160 before school starts), the other is my topics screen so you can get an idea of where to look for things to bank - the material isn't organized too intuitively always, so I do recommend just looking through everything every now and then.

Banked_Mastered_Daily_Cards.png


Banked_by_Subject.png


Good luck amigos!
 
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GTP said:
I thought of you a few hours ago and wondered why you hadn't posted (im not a creeper lol). Figured you were busy on wards. That's a great score buddy!!! Are you happy with it? Please post soon with some general tips and comment on how/if gt helped!!
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This post probably won't be at the detail you're looking for, but I was busy this evening and now it's getting late, sorry. You ask if I am happy with my score, but that's not as simple to answer now as if I had gotten a in the 250's as I had hoped. Let me be absolutely clear though (since some ***** already mistook one of my other posts on the "2012 scores and experiences" thread), I know my score is very good...maybe not SDN good, but whatever. Also, I am very happy that my score will meet the minimum cutoff for scores that some residencies may have. As I alluded to earlier though, my practice scores were all consistently in the mid to upper 250's, it seemed reasonable to think the real thing would come out in that range too (like it seems to have done for most people on SDN). Unfortunately, that wasn't the case for me, which leaves me feeling like I underperformed on the real deal. For me, anytime I don't perform up to the level I consider myself capable of, that is somewhat disappointing regardless of how my performance compares to others. I hope it is clear that I am not complaining or fishing for compliments here. 😛

With that out of the way, I can talk a little bit about how GT factored into things. I don't think I really need to go into much detail though, since you've all seen that I'm a big fan of GT. That hasn't changed at all, even though my score was below my practice scores. I really don't think my practice scores or real score would've been nearly where they were without the repetition and structure that GT provided. It forced me to work on my weaknesses and improve them. There's really not much more I can say. Reading a book wouldn't have forced me to keep hammering those weaknesses at the same frequency.

JackShephard MD said:
Great job by pizzy and lrk. I'm sure both will do well 3rd year + match whatever.

I'm taking an SDN hiatus for a few months, just wanted to say congrats. Good luck to all the gunners on their prep.
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Good idea on the SDN hiatus, I think I will be doing the same thing indefinitely very soon. This has been an incredible resource, but I think it's about the end of the line for me here on a regular basis. I'll probably slowly ween myself of SDN over the next week or two though...😉

Gunneria said:
Congrats to peterparker7 too check the step1 forums guys...265
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Absolutely congrats to ipizzy and peterparker7 and all other GTers who got there scores, as well as everyone else who got their scores too.
 
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nopo18 said:
Man, micro was my favorite part of GT! Lol, somethjng much be wrong with me...

If you have clinical micro made rediculously simple, try usin that to learn then bank the cards... Antibiotics is poorly taught at my school, so basically had to learn that way anyway 🙂 goodluck!
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I'm about to start micro soon, and can you learn micro for the first time using CMMRS as your primary source? I don't like using review books as a primary learning method but I got too many other fat books to read for other subjects
 
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use CMMRS heck only for the SILLY pictures and captions, heck what I did was find these images floating on google images and annotate to my GT:
i.e. http://dev.epubbud.com/uploads/1/3/...y_Made_Ridiculously_Simple_pdf/index-68_1.jpg

Thats salmonella becoming latent in your gallbladder (i.e.- chronic carrier state)

As someone who has used microcards, CMMRs, Levinson, lecture notes, and GT, all i can advise is that the best way to do learn micro is to read the "medical micro and virology" portions in levinson immuno for the backdrop (really lays the best foundation)..but the rest (the clinical stuff) will be grilling facts from either microcards or GT...in my opinion GT goes above and beyond and their mneumonics are incredible and comprehensive...microcards are great but GT's fact recall system for a subject that relies heavily on memorization is better, couple that with CMMRs and the dx Webpath images and I can't imagine u missing a single question on micro
 
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I sent GT an email. There will be a price change with the new program, I was told the bump will likely take place in early August. I was also told if we can get a group of 25 students to sign up then we could get a 25% discount, which would bring the year subscription to about $173. Send me a message if you're interested and lets see if we can get 25 by the price jump.
 
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RacerX528 said:
I sent GT an email. There will be a price change with the new program, I was told the bump will likely take place in early August. I was also told if we can get a group of 25 students to sign up then we could get a 25% discount, which would bring the year subscription to about $173. Send me a message if you're interested and lets see if we can get 25 by the price jump.
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I'm not terribly strong on the math, but isn't $173 after a 25% discount an original price of $230? As in, the 12 month subscription for FC is the same price as for GT right now? They might change the shorter subscriptions plans though, to force more people into the bigger packages.
 
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withrye said:
I'm not terribly strong on the math, but isn't $173 after a 25% discount an original price of $230? As in, the 12 month subscription for FC is the same price as for GT right now? They might change the shorter subscriptions plans though, to force more people into the bigger packages.
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I think he is referring to getting 25% off for gt now.. They haven't released FC pricing so no one knows how much itll be
 
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If I started a one month trial and then bought a year long subscription, would it add the year to the end of the month or just start from the day I bought it?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD
 
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It seems that most people begin GT during their 2nd year, or the summer before M2. What if you don't have a summer?

In my case, I have a compressed organ-system curriculum with less than a month of summer between M1 and M2. Since it is not the traditional curriculum, I'll be learning bits of everything (not a block of path, a block of pharm, etc) for ~18 months, and then take the boards in January of 2014.

With this in mind, would it be reasonable to start GT at the beginning of M1? Keeping the cards only to the class material, the workload wouldn't be unreasonable. Also, I'm on a P/F unranked system, so I'm not worried about honoring classes. Thoughts?
 
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Ive been using GT for over a month now, and I just noticed something, though I am embarrassed that I am just catching it now.

On the picture of the calendar shown on the main page, it looks like it shows a series of numbers. I assume these numbers represent the daily review questions.

I dont recall doing any questions today, but it says 0 for today. However, this morning, I did complete some questions that I was too lazy to do yesterday.

Does that mean I have no questions scheduled for today and I can just chill?
 
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Snuke said:
With this in mind, would it be reasonable to start GT at the beginning of M1? Keeping the cards only to the class material, the workload wouldn't be unreasonable. Also, I'm on a P/F unranked system, so I'm not worried about honoring classes. Thoughts?
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I started GT at the very beginning of 1st year not because I had a compressed summer but because I really liked the idea of the program and thought I could benefit from it during classes, and I personally think that's the best idea. It did help me in classes and on shelf exams a lot. I got in the upper 80 or lower 90 percentile on first year shelf exams (histo, physio, biochem) by doing no studying outside of the daily GT reviews and card banking. I feel like the program works the best when you have a long time to use it and bank cards as you learn material in classes.

Try the free month trial at the beginning of M1, if you like it after a month than keep it up.
 
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bbaggins said:
I started GT at the very beginning of 1st year not because I had a compressed summer but because I really liked the idea of the program and thought I could benefit from it during classes, and I personally think that's the best idea. It did help me in classes and on shelf exams a lot. I got in the upper 80 or lower 90 percentile on first year shelf exams (histo, physio, biochem) by doing no studying outside of the daily GT reviews and card banking. I feel like the program works the best when you have a long time to use it and bank cards as you learn material in classes.

Try the free month trial at the beginning of M1, if you like it after a month than keep it up.
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That's helpful. My plan is to do GT, read FA for the topics of the day, annotate from a review book for greater detail, RR path if applicable, and then look over class notes once I have a thorough understanding of the topic. Start of m2, which is only 4 months long, I will start a qbank. Likely Kaplan. It sounds like finishing banking GT is critical before dedicated study.
 
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GTP said:
Ive been using GT for over a month now, and I just noticed something, though I am embarrassed that I am just catching it now.

On the picture of the calendar shown on the main page, it looks like it shows a series of numbers. I assume these numbers represent the daily review questions.

I dont recall doing any questions today, but it says 0 for today. However, this morning, I did complete some questions that I was too lazy to do yesterday.

Does that mean I have no questions scheduled for today and I can just chill?
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The calendar shows the current number of scheduled review questions for that day. If you put off a whole day, the number will be added to tomorrow's. If you do half your questions and come back later, you'll see the number decreased the next time you log in.
 
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Have any of you tried Firecracker yet? What do you guys think?

I wish there was more to it right now. Everything looks nice but the site isn't fully functional yet to get a real feel - the calendar doesn't seem to update and many of the questions don't show answers or have erroneous scripts, etc. I understand it's still early but I was trying to use that as a trial run instead of GT for a month but it's not use if it's not really working and I can't really progress.

As a side note for those who have been GT users... how do the questions compare to Firecracker? Or are they revising current GT questions? GT questions seemed to ask open-ended questions that require you to regurgitate information on the card and Firecracker seemed to ask more multiple choice-type without showing the choice (e.g. would blood pressure go up or down). It's likely I just used a small sample size and they really are the same mix, but was just wondering if questions were being changed...
 
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FC = upgraded version of GT. FC won't be out of beta till august but if you have GT, you can simply migrate your account (with everything saved) over to FC and all your banked cards/questions/etc will be saved.

So in other words, FC is just a sleeker, more user-friendly version of GT but everything else (including the open ended questions, which by the way, are essential for rapid recall) will remain the same.

That's my understanding at least. Hope that helps!
 
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Are you guys 100 percent sure about august release date....cant wait for the personalized approach to done the beastly 200plus question days ive been having and the anki intrgration of adding ur own cards
 
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Early August is the date they gave me for the anticipated price jump. For those interested in the 25% discount please email me at [email protected] as it is much easier for me to keep track and communicate with everyone. I started looking yesterday and we are at 14 so I'm hoping we can get to 25 people for the discount so we aren't close to the price jump.
 
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RacerX528 said:
Early August is the date they gave me for the anticipated price jump. For those interested in the 25% discount please email me at [email protected] as it is much easier for me to keep track and communicate with everyone. I started looking yesterday and we are at 14 so I'm hoping we can get to 25 people for the discount so we aren't close to the price jump.
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To be clear, are you looking for 25 people who currently don't have GT subscriptions to start new ones? Or 25 people to pledge to use FC when it opens, garnering us a 25% discount each?
 
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withrye said:
To be clear, are you looking for 25 people who currently don't have GT subscriptions to start new ones? Or 25 people to pledge to use FC when it opens, garnering us a 25% discount each?
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Looking for 25 people to start new subscriptions, or sign up for another year if they have an expiring one.
 
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Hey guys, might have a repeat question here but this thread is huge and all so bear with me.

I start classes in about a month and was planning on using GT every day from here on. My school follows a systems-based curriculum. I don't work or anything so I would be able to study consistently every day. My questions are:

1. How many flashcards can I get through each day if I study for around 6 hours each day for a month? How much of the GT will I be able to complete or will 1 month not be enough?

2. If I encounter something I didn't cover over MS1, should I skip it or learn the material anyway?

3. What books are good to supplement material that I am not familiar with and/or would like to more completely understand?

If anyone can provide some advice or suggestions regarding my study plan for the next month I would greatly appreciate it.
 
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I actually did some studying for about a month before MS1 and read not all but a good chunk of "Immunology for Medical Students" by Nairn and Helbert, then of course banked the accompanying cards. I had read on forums that immunology is a hard subject and HY for the step. I found it to be super helpful and it made my immuno class much easier. I would not recommend doing immunology from GT as your primary source.
 
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premedmind said:
Hey guys, might have a repeat question here but this thread is huge and all so bear with me.

I start classes in about a month and was planning on using GT every day from here on. My school follows a systems-based curriculum. I don't work or anything so I would be able to study consistently every day. My questions are:

1. How many flashcards can I get through each day if I study for around 6 hours each day for a month? How much of the GT will I be able to complete or will 1 month not be enough?

It depends. I'm really strong in immuno so I banked about 10 immuno cards a day (20 cards a day in total with an additional 10 cards on other topics), and I was 80% complete for immuno in about 2 weeks. I also had a full time job and only did gt about 2-3 hours a day. I completely mastered all the immuno in this time (80% complete, 81% mastery). I'm skipping the drugs for now because I hate drugs, that's why I'm not at 100% yet.

I started banking right after exams so I still remembered a lot, which was why I was able to bank 20-25 cards a day for the first two weeks in June. After that, things got harder and I was seeing some new material. My banking slowed to 10-15 a day. Now things are REALLY hard and virtually everything I am seeing is new, so I'm only banking 10 cards a day till ms2 starts in 2 weeks. During school, I will only bank 3 a day. This should bring me to 100% banked by the end of January.

Im no expert in board prep, but if I were you, 6 hours seems like a lot to waste on gt daily. You should cap gt at 2-3 hour. I plan to do gt at school. It's really easy to fit it in between classes, lunch time, useless classes, etc. With this plan, I won't be doing gt when I get home, and I will have another 6-8 hours daily to study other things.

2. If I encounter something I didn't cover over MS1, should I skip it or learn the material anyway?

You should learn it

3. What books are good to supplement material that I am not familiar with and/or would like to more completely understand?

You can't learn things in gt for the first time, at least I can't. So you need other sources to reinforce - eg costanzo for physio.

I've heard epic things about Pathoma, Goljan audio and Goljan rr. I plan to use all these sources. If I were you, cap gt at 2-3 hours and use these other sources as well

If anyone can provide some advice or suggestions regarding my study plan for the next month I would greatly appreciate it.
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All in all, depending on how much you remember from ms1 and If you really feel like it, you should be able to bank 300 cards before school starts.
 
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word of advice and this is my own opinion...honestly, start GT after M1 and in the summertime (or at least use it for micro if thats ur last block of M1)...a lot of M1 is adjusting and I can't imagine how hard it'll be to pour through GT and get through 9-5 days of anatomy lab, more importantly, you will need to hone down some conceptual framework first and you will be frustrated if GT goes over stuff your class and exams don't cover and vice versa...trust me, M1 summer will be enough time to bank 50% of GT and getting the necessary review...it's hard to appreciate what I'm saying but I'm sure you'll get where I'm coming from once s**t hits the fan this year
 
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How many questions do you guys get assigned to you per day? I'm only 12% banked (9% mastered) and I'm at upwards of 60-70 questions per day already! If I miss a day I'm into 120+ questions which is kind of excessive. Just wondering if I'm too conservative in rating my recall or something. Oh, and I'm doing the comprehensive mode, not the lite mode- which is probably half my problem, haha.
 
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bonsaipalmtree said:
How many questions do you guys get assigned to you per day? I'm only 12% banked (9% mastered) and I'm at upwards of 60-70 questions per day already! If I miss a day I'm into 120+ questions which is kind of excessive. Just wondering if I'm too conservative in rating my recall or something. Oh, and I'm doing the comprehensive mode, not the lite mode- which is probably half my problem, haha.
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This is why I'm looking forward to firecracker. You can set a cap for the daily reviews. I have 386 questions scheduled for tomorrow and I'm not looking forward to it.
 
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Thanks boss. Really appreciate the links.

Also, how many q are in comprehensive v the lite version. In lite I see about 1080 questions. But comprehensive shows the same and i was wondering if there were more or if this number was a typo
 
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GTP said:
This is why I'm looking forward to firecracker. You can set a cap for the daily reviews. I have 386 questions scheduled for tomorrow and I'm not looking forward to it.
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I literally laughed out loud at the thought of 386 questions in a single day. Firecracker needs to get here ASAP.
 
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Smh. It's almost 7 and I'm avoiding those review questions like the plague. I still have to work out and eat dinner, watch two hours of tv, and be asleep by 12. -_- I've banked 20 cards today so it wasn't a total waste of time. I'll probably do the questions during commercials 😀
 
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GTP said:
Smh. It's almost 7 and I'm avoiding those review questions like the plague. I still have to work out and eat dinner, watch two hours of tv, and be asleep by 12. -_- I've banked 20 cards today so it wasn't a total waste of time. I'll probably do the questions during commercials 😀
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Why don't you just do the questions based on subject? Like, for example, do all the orthopedic ones, then psychiatry, then derm, etc. There's an option to do that. Makes those 350+ questions much less daunting since you're doing them in bite-sized chunks. That's what I do and I love it.
 
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Throwsheat313 said:
Why don't you just do the questions based on subject? Like, for example, do all the orthopedic ones, then psychiatry, then derm, etc. There's an option to do that. Makes those 350+ questions much less daunting since you're doing them in bite-sized chunks. That's what I do and I love it.
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Oh cool. I'm gonna do this now 😀
 
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For those who use GT throughout the day and on the go, what devices do you use to access it? Do you use GT on your phones and tablets in addition to your computers? Are you able to both bank and do daily questions on mobile devices, conveniently?

Or, do you generally try to do it on a computer as much as possible?
 
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