Help Needed! Which to believe, UWorld or NBME Practice Exams?!?!

[Nebulus2012]

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So here's the deal: I'm shooting for at least a 240+ on this Step 2 CK exam, and my predictors are all over the map.

On UWorld, doing Tutor or timed blocks of 44 random, I am consistently scoring around 70-80% correct. MedFriends and the SDN charts all predicts at 250+. However, I told NBME 4 a week ago and it predicted a 218. On the free NBME 150 questions I took yesterday, I got 82% and MedFriends predicts a 221.

I only have a week left to go, and I feel confident with the material. I just don't know if I can score 90% correct on 9 blocks of 44 for the real test....

Any suggestions? Which is a better predictors, UWorld or the NBME exams???

 

[greg1184]

USMLE World is not meant to be a predictor of your performance in Step 2. It is intended by the authors to be a teaching tool. It even says so on the title page.
"We strongly suggest that you use our Qbank as a learning tool, and not for mere assessment of your knowledge."
Either way, I would never use a bank, where more than 75% of the questions are answered correctly by less than half the medical student population (along with some less than 30% answered correctly!) as a valid predictor of anything.

Probably the NBME exams would be relatively accurate in predicting your score. From my experiences with Step 1, nothing is truly accurate.

 

[myhandsarecold]

Take the UW SelfAssessment which gives u a predicted score; it's $10 if u have a UW subscription, $25 if u don't.

 

[Nebulus2012]

USMLE World is not meant to be a predictor of your performance in Step 2. It is intended by the authors to be a teaching tool. It even says so on the title page.
"We strongly suggest that you use our Qbank as a learning tool, and not for mere assessment of your knowledge."
Either way, I would never use a bank, where more than 75% of the questions are answered correctly by less than half the medical student population (along with some less than 30% answered correctly!) as a valid predictor of anything.

Probably the NBME exams would be relatively accurate in predicting your score. From my experiences with Step 1, nothing is truly accurate.

You are partially correct.

USMLEWorld itself does not have the capability to predict your Step 2 score built into its functionality. However, websites like SDN and MedFriends have compiled hundreds to thousands of date points and plotted the curve.

While the qbank questions are more difficult that those on the actual exam (hence the "learning not evaluating" disclaimer), there is certainly a strong correlation (r of about 0.8, actually, see the sticky at the top of this forum) between timed,random qbank percentage correct and overall knowledge base. This then goes on to correlate with final Step 2 performance.

Also, I just took NBME 2 and scored a 242, which is much more in line with what Qbank has been predicting for me. So much for lack of correlation, huh?