Gunner Training?

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withrye said:
I have around 150 questions a day, which takes me about an hour to 90 minutes to get through. I do them all mixed, not subject-by-subject. Then I bank a few additional cards per day, roughly 5-10. Banking just means looking at a new card you've never seen and adding its questions to your review question load. My total time per day might be around 2-3 hours.

I'm reviewing MS1 material, so I can rate lots of questions at 4 or 5 the first time depending on whether I'm up to speed on the topic. Otherwise, I rate stuff at a 2 or 3 depending on whether I used short term memory to get it (3) or didn't even get it at all (2).
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Do you look at the old cards/topics (for that day or anything beyond that) in addition to looking at the 5-10 new ones? How long do you usually take to get through the new ones?

On a side note, are you guys going through question banks daily too? I want to pick one up soon and figuring out how to divide the time. The question bank is the priority and if I can manage time well, I will want the longer subscription to GT. If it takes 2-3 hours each for GT and question bank, do you guys think alternating GT and question bank days sound good, or am I cutting myself short twice by not doing either daily?
 
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Man, i can't wait for firecracker to be released, a 150 question cap is idealistic but theres no way it'd be possible to have a balanced life once school starts...im at 35/25 guys, hope everyones been trucking hard this summer through MS1
 
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Transformers said:
Man, i can't wait for firecracker to be released, a 150 question cap is idealistic but theres no way it'd be possible to have a balanced life once school starts...im at 35/25 guys, hope everyones been trucking hard this summer through MS1
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+1. Gt gave me 300 review questions today. I banked 20 cards and cleared all the questions. Fml. So sick of this. And school starts next week 🙁
 
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thawunandonly said:
Do you look at the old cards/topics (for that day or anything beyond that) in addition to looking at the 5-10 new ones? How long do you usually take to get through the new ones?

On a side note, are you guys going through question banks daily too? I want to pick one up soon and figuring out how to divide the time. The question bank is the priority and if I can manage time well, I will want the longer subscription to GT. If it takes 2-3 hours each for GT and question bank, do you guys think alternating GT and question bank days sound good, or am I cutting myself short twice by not doing either daily?
Click to expand...

There's no point to looking at old cards, because the whole point is that the daily review questions are timed for you to review old cards at maximally effective intervals. The timing of new cards depends on how many questions there are per card and my previous familiarity with the subject.

I'm not doing a qbank until the end of MS2; GT plus school will be all the academic stuff I care to do.
 
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What does the clear todays review button mean, when should you use it, and how does it affect the daily questions you get down the road?
 
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Transformers said:
What does the clear todays review button mean, when should you use it, and how does it affect the daily questions you get down the road?
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It'll give you the option of spreading today's questions over the next 7 days, 14 days, or putting them in the "catch up" pile that you should review.
 
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Brotato said:
Did they ever give an ETA? September? October?
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I received an email yesterday saying Beta should be released early August, along with the step 2 material. Also, they mentioned that with the price increase they are doing away with multi-month plans.
 
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I hope it's early August. I'm kinda sick of my daily 200-300 qs. Maybe I'm being stingy with my ratings
 
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Is there any GT section or topic that you guys think could stand alone/be used as a primary learning source? Or are all of them best used alongside or after studying from other sources or in class?
 
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jayhvvip said:
I received an email yesterday saying Beta should be released early August, along with the step 2 material. Also, they mentioned that with the price increase they are doing away with multi-month plans.
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Doing away with mult-month plans is definitely bad news for students and for GT. I don't think students will pay the monthly fee for two years; I think they're getting a bit too greedy for their own good.
 
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I just threw down another 12months for 3rd year.. Hopefully I won't have to get another extra subscription for the clerkship material soon to be added.
 
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Just wanted to share. Upcoming MS2 here. I am not going to lie, most of the days are pretty rough going through the questions and it makes me want to cry, but I think this thing really works and I am going to stick with it.

SKcy2.png

46jJL.png


I am upset with myself that I didn't bank all of embryo this summer, but that is the only thing from first year I am missing and I figure it can be done over next break (winter?)

Plan for the future: 3 week organ blocks so BRS physio and pathoma and bank GT stuff from the previous block the weekend before each upcoming block. During the block do the school syllabus stuff and kaplan Q bank specific questions that that block. Grind UWorld come dedicated time. Any comments or advice?

Judging by daily questions at current percent mastered, at 100% it would be around 200-300Q/day at most I am thinking?
 
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jhamaican said:
Just wanted to share. Upcoming MS2 here. I am not going to lie, most of the days are pretty rough going through the questions and it makes me want to cry, but I think this thing really works and I am going to stick with it.

SKcy2.png

46jJL.png


I am upset with myself that I didn't bank all of embryo this summer, but that is the only thing from first year I am missing and I figure it can be done over next break (winter?)

Plan for the future: 3 week organ blocks so BRS physio and pathoma and bank GT stuff from the previous block the weekend before each upcoming block. During the block do the school syllabus stuff and kaplan Q bank specific questions that that block. Grind UWorld come dedicated time. Any comments or advice?

Judging by daily questions at current percent mastered, at 100% it would be around 200-300Q/day at most I am thinking?
Click to expand...

Wow great mastery/progress going into ms2. You are in amazing shape for 2nd year. Do you think you could share your strategy for banking/rating? I think it would be very helpful!

Ie do you only bank after you learn in class? Do you redo questions that you get 1/2/3? Do you grade your 5's very harshly- like do you ensure you know everything on the card before rating a 5?

Do you find yourself forgetting stuff you rated a 5?
 
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jhamaican said:
Just wanted to share. Upcoming MS2 here. I am not going to lie, most of the days are pretty rough going through the questions and it makes me want to cry, but I think this thing really works and I am going to stick with it.

SKcy2.png

46jJL.png


I am upset with myself that I didn't bank all of embryo this summer, but that is the only thing from first year I am missing and I figure it can be done over next break (winter?)

Plan for the future: 3 week organ blocks so BRS physio and pathoma and bank GT stuff from the previous block the weekend before each upcoming block. During the block do the school syllabus stuff and kaplan Q bank specific questions that that block. Grind UWorld come dedicated time. Any comments or advice?

Judging by daily questions at current percent mastered, at 100% it would be around 200-300Q/day at most I am thinking?
Click to expand...


Twinzies 🙂
 
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"Plan for the future: 3 week organ blocks so BRS physio and pathoma and bank GT stuff from the previous block the weekend before each upcoming block. During the block do the school syllabus stuff and kaplan Q bank specific questions that that block. Grind UWorld come dedicated time. Any comments or advice?"

Going into 2nd year as well and trying to plan for the best way to bank GT for classes as I go. One of the GT vets whose already taken the exam and killed it, PeterParker7, said that he would spend the first week of a 4 week block hammering home the class syllabus and spend the rest of the time using board specific material to study. I was thinking for myself that I will bank material covered in class as the class goes along instead of waiting for the block to be over. That might be a lot of cards at once. Second year is a load by itself and with 4+ classes at a time, that might mean 10+ cards a day on top of the review.
 
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wtffff that progress looks so beastly. That was through how many weeks/months?

I thought I was doing an okay pace at 5 cards a day but you guys must be grading yourselves more leniently than I am or you have ridiculous memory...

I'm jelly 👍
 
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thawunandonly said:
wtffff that progress looks so beastly. That was through how many weeks/months?

I thought I was doing an okay pace at 5 cards a day but you guys must be grading yourselves more leniently than I am or you have ridiculous memory...

I'm jelly 👍
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Ive banked more than the other person. But I've been told I have ok memory. I'm definitely not lenient with gradin. If anything, im too harsh.
 
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Hi Guys! Firecracker/GT's team has been reading this forum religiously for a few years now and want to thank you all so much for all the insightful feedback and continued support. We continue to grow at an astounding rate and have you all to thank. In the interest of doing as much as we can to help you guys succeed, we're hiring more programmers, authors, etc. The future is looking pretty sweet indeed!

I also noticed that a few of you were hoping someone from GT/Firecracker could jump in. To this end, here I am! 🙂 We've been trying to keep out of the way but I do want to make sure that you guys know we are here for you 24 X 7 and that you can always reach us directly at chat at firecracker.me with any questions or concerns whatsoever. Going forward I'll likely jump in every once and a while to remind you that we're here for you all, in any way that we can help you build a successful career.

I figure I'll answer some FAQs but def ask us any and everything on your mind!

Re: Firecracker (FC) -

As most of you likely know, you can check out our Beta and see where we're headed. By early Aug you will be able to migrate all of your GT score history, flagged/banked topics, months left on your account, etc. over to FC. The next step for us is to hone our core process as much as possible. The core process we see is: a) you tell us what topics you want to focus on and then b) we recommend what questions to do based on your performance and the millions of datapoints we have on what worked best for your peers. We want to make this process as clear, simple, and zippy as possible.

By mid August, we will be integrating hundreds of USMLE/Shelf style questions to make sure you guys not only know what you need to know, but can easily and quickly apply your knowledge in the way the USMLE, Shelfs and most of your courses require. Since most USMLE style questions require knowledge of many different concepts (often from different topics), his will also be a great way for us to help reduce the question load. For instance, if a USMLE style question has 10 associated concepts, once you reach a level of proficiency with those concepts, instead of asking you 10 recall questions, we will only ask you 1 USMLE style question. Talk about killing 10 birds with one stone! We think the value proposition to you guys will be immense. Imaging getting a USMLE style question wrong but then being able to see what you prior performance on related concepts was so you can really pinpoint your weaknesses. Reverse engineering your way to success is how we think about it. If you guys think of us as First Aid / Step Up to Medicine on steroids, this next phase of our development would be as if FA/SUTM had a baby with UWorld and then gave that baby steroids. That beastly child will be Firecracker. 🙂


Re: Clerkship / Shelfs / USMLE Step 2 Content -

In the Firecracker beta, you can check out the Step 2 topics we've already developed. We think we're about 80% of the way there in terms of topics but we still need to make sure we have a bunch of questions (recall, USMLE style, etc.) for each concept within the topic. As mentioned before, we have hundreds of these already authored but we haven't integrated them yet because doing so will require some tweaks to our content management system (for example, we need to let our authors and editors add questions and then associate them with all relevant concepts).

And, since there is so much overlap between Step 1 and Clerkship content, we're going to roll it all together into one "kick the **** out of medical school" program. 🙂 So no worries about needing another account.


Re: New Pricing -

In an effort to simplify our signup process (and pave the way for the ability for us to offer different types of plans such as "Qbank only" without adding too much complexity), we're doing away with all multi-month plans.

And because we have and want to continue improving both our technology and content, we are going to increase our monthly subscription cost. (We aren't 100% sure but think it will be around $39/month to start. As we add more content and features we may need to increase our prices again but we will do our best to keep the price down). But, we also plan on increasing the number of free months we give our on Facebook, Twitter, etc. and we plan on still giving you guys a free month for every friend you refer who signs up.

I just realized how darn long this post is so I'll stop now. But let me know if you guys have any questions whatsoever! I'll also be back to see if any of you are interested in joining our team as an author, editor, blogger, ambassador, etc., and to get your feedback on some ideas we have.

Thanks guys! Hope you guys all did really well on Step 1! We've been hearing some awesome scores so congrats! Problem is that so many people are now using GT/FC so the advantage is decreasing a bit... but there is always opportunity for those of you willing to put in the work. Bruce Lee once said that he never feared the outcome of a fight because he knew that there was no way that anyone else could have trained harder than him.

- Ben

(w) about.me/bcwill
 
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Hey bchandler. Is there any way that you could inform us of when the pricing will change in advance, so that maybe we can utilize the pricing plans for a little while longer? As a gesture towards SDN fans, is there any way you could show us some love? I'm going to be starting M1 in a month, and I plan to be using a month trial, after which, I was planning to sign up for a year. If you go monthly, I may have to to look at the pricing, and delay GT until later on in the year.
 
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40$ a month? Ugh. I definitely can't afford to use gt after step 1. Everyone I've sent free trials to, please sign up so I can get a couple of free months with step 2 🙂
 
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GTP said:
40$ a month? Ugh. I definitely can't afford to use gt after step 1. Everyone I've sent free trials to, please sign up so I can get a couple of free months with step 2 🙂
Click to expand...

It's a shame that a product with a basis in advanced planning and consistent, long-term hard work doesn't reward the users willing to put in the cash for 12- or 24-month plans.
 
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bchandler said:
By mid August, we will be integrating hundreds of USMLE/Shelf style questions to make sure you guys not only know what you need to know, but can easily and quickly apply your knowledge in the way the USMLE, Shelfs and most of your courses require. Since most USMLE style questions require knowledge of many different concepts (often from different topics), his will also be a great way for us to help reduce the question load. For instance, if a USMLE style question has 10 associated concepts, once you reach a level of proficiency with those concepts, instead of asking you 10 recall questions, we will only ask you 1 USMLE style question. Talk about killing 10 birds with one stone! We think the value proposition to you guys will be immense. Imaging getting a USMLE style question wrong but then being able to see what you prior performance on related concepts was so you can really pinpoint your weaknesses. Reverse engineering your way to success is how we think about it. If you guys think of us as First Aid / Step Up to Medicine on steroids, this next phase of our development would be as if FA/SUTM had a baby with UWorld and then gave that baby steroids. That beastly child will be Firecracker. 🙂
Click to expand...


We can assume the current strict recall based question bank will still be there right?

Also, when will there be an Ipad/Iphone app?

Thanks for telling us that info
 
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Man, I really am kicking myself for not logging into SDN in years and figuring out this program earlier🙄

About to start 2nd years in two weeks and I just started banking last week. No way in hell I can bank all first year info in 2 weeks. But, Im going to give it a good shot. Is there any disadvantage to banking too quickly?
 
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$40 a month? Getting rid of long term subscriptions? The whole point of GT is long-term repetition. I fear you are losing touch with your fanbase here.
 
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devils143 said:
Man, I really am kicking myself for not logging into SDN in years and figuring out this program earlier🙄

About to start 2nd years in two weeks and I just started banking last week. No way in hell I can bank all first year info in 2 weeks. But, Im going to give it a good shot. Is there any disadvantage to banking too quickly?
Click to expand...

You get reamed within two weeks by your daily question load. If you bank too fast, even a small percentage of weak questions will become a huge burden, with hundreds of questions to be reviewed each day. Even worse, if you don't learn them, you just end up pushing the same set of 100+ questions from day to day to day.

At the outset, you can bank really quickly provided you know the material already and can therefore rate it at a 4 or 5 immediately. However, remember that even if you rate 100 questions at a 5, that's 100 questions that are showing up 14 days from now, in addition to a ton of other questions you've banked over the past two weeks.
 
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I have to bite the bullett though right? It makes no sense starting to bank anatomy questions in the middle of path/pharm/micro
 
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bchandler said:
As most of you likely know, you can check out our Beta and see where we're headed. By early Aug you will be able to migrate all of your GT score history, flagged/banked topics, months left on your account, etc. over to FC. The next step for us is to hone our core process as much as possible. The core process we see is: a) you tell us what topics you want to focus on and then b) we recommend what questions to do based on your performance and the millions of datapoints we have on what worked best for your peers. We want to make this process as clear, simple, and zippy as possible.
Click to expand...

Please Please Please make it so we can review and do all the cards within 1 subsection only. Right now there is an option to do all cards from say biochem but not subsections from biochem - like all cards of cellular metabolism only. This seems like something that could be implemented in an hour or less just by adding the subcategories to the "do all cards from xyz list". This would be a godsend for those of us upcoming MS2 so we can review for microbiology or just renal pathology etc... in addition to our daily cards. Thank you and great product!
 
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In your first one or two time through certain cards:

Do you guys give your ratings based on the specific questions being asked? Or, do you say, I don't know some of the additional info on the card so I'll give a low rating?
 
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devils143 said:
In your first one or two time through certain cards:

Do you guys give your ratings based on the specific questions being asked? Or, do you say, I don't know some of the additional info on the card so I'll give a low rating?
Click to expand...

I rate it based on the specific question. Later, they may ask a more specific or vignette-style question based on the additional info and I'll get it wrong; that's when I rate it low.
 
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withrye said:
I rate it based on the specific question. Later, they may ask a more specific or vignette-style question based on the additional info and I'll get it wrong; that's when I rate it low.
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+1

but you have to be careful, sometimes the question will ask about a concept that they forget to highlight in red. make sure you answer the question properly even if they forget to highlight it in red.
 
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Brotato said:
$40 a month? Getting rid of long term subscriptions? The whole point of GT is long-term repetition. I fear you are losing touch with your fanbase here.
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yup. im glad i bought my one yr subscription already. i definitely wont be using gt during rotations though. im not prepared to blow $500 only to be able to use it a few times a week during surgery and other crazy rotations.
 
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$40 a month (and rising according to the representative) for the two steps? Can we split the two programs up and split the price; wouldn't that be fairer? MSI/II students aren't going to use the step 2 material anyway, why are we going to be forced to pay for something we aren't using.
 
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I was on the GT website today trying to purchase a year subscription, but I can't for the life of me figure what link I need to click to be able to pay for the subscription. Has GT already taken down the pay links in anticipation for the price increase/subscription length change? Anyone else having the same problem, or am I just missing the link? I must have spent half an hour clicking every link on the page. If the year subscription is no longer available, no way I am paying 40$ a month. Thanks for the help.
 
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good thing i just bought another year subscription a day ago.. i sill think 40/m is still worth it for m1s and m2s

go to My Account. under Subscription in the top right click 'Extend' hit Cash or Credit Card pic
 
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