How easy will it be to "pass" STEP 1?

[tunaktunak]

Will it be similar to the amount of studying required to get a 500 on the MCAT? Or am I severely underestimating what "passing" would entail?

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[Goro]

Will it be similar to the amount of studying required to get a 500 on the MCAT? Or am I severely underestimating what "passing" would

Only you can answer this.

If You're a med student who can get a 75% in your preclinical years, then you should be able to pass

 

[Blueprint Med School]

Nobody knows yet. If they don't change the passing score, it'll be relatively easy- current passing rate for Step 1 is something like 95%. I do think they will slightly raise the passing score though.

Kevin W, MCAT Tutor
Med School Tutors

 

[datboi_58]

Nobody knows yet. If they don't change the passing score, it'll be relatively easy- current passing rate for Step 1 is something like 95%. I do think they will slightly raise the passing score though.

Kevin W, MCAT Tutor
Med School Tutors

But this is also with most people trying to get the highest score possible since a good Step 1 score is necessary to be competitive in residency matching. I wonder if the pass rate will drop once it’s truly P/F and the actually score won’t matter because people will stop trying as hard.

 

[Lucca]

Will it be similar to the amount of studying required to get a 500 on the MCAT? Or am I severely underestimating what "passing" would entail?

You are underestimating what it takes to pass.

tl;dr: p/f step is a win for med student mental health but it's not just a walk in the park.

The tests are not comparable in this way. The MCAT is more g-loaded than Step. What does that mean? It means that, in my opinion, general test-taking ability and reasoning skills will take you much farther on the MCAT than Step. A lot of Step style questions are like "did you commit this one random fact to memory or not", similar to the MCAT "passage-free" questions in the science sections. Yes, there is reasoning on Step too but even that reasoning is more akin to step-wise reasoning where you are jumping from one science fact or epidemiological association to the next until you get to the answer; compare that to the MCAT where you could eliminate half the answers on most questions with simple logic.

The volume of content you have to know for each exams are also vastly different.

Step going Pass/Fail means that there is much less pressure to study for this particular exam, but it likely doesnt mean you can pass it after finishing preclin cold without any dedicated time (in any case, thats not what it means for most students, I'm sure some could've passed it cold). And it most certainly does not mean that you can just blow off learning preclin content entirely because that content will come back on Step 2, clerkships, shelf-exams, etc. even if only a subset of Step 1/preclin knowledge actually carries over to the rest of med school.

Every year there are people who try their hardest to study for step and still fail. It's a small minority, but it does happen. These are people who had the GPAs and MCAT scores to get into medical school, unlike the pool of MCAT takers, most of which will never get into med school (unfortunately) even if they do score above a 500. How "easy" it will be will depend on how prepared you are and you still have to put in that work. Thankfully you will no longer have to harm yourself memorizing lysosomal storage diseases or the 3rd most common point mutation in a specific protein for a specific disease in a specific population. It also means you can probably schedule a shorter dedicated study period and take it when you're comfortably passing without worrying about whether or not you should postpone to bring your practice scores closer to your target for Neurodermopedic Surgery.