how much time per block?

[coconut lime]

how long do people spend on each 50-q block? (either on qbank, or the real thing if you've already taken it)....i am a pretty quick reader and i finish in under 30 min. i dont review my answers because i am afraid i will overanalyze things and then change answers to the wrong ones. so far the strategy has been working, i just got 80% on qbank and i take step 1 in 1 week. does anyone else do this?

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[Clair de Lune]

I've been getting through them really fast, too. I have been having 15+ minutes to spare. Like you I am afraid to go back & analyze too much because I am notorious for changing a right answer to a wrong one. My strategy for the test, I think, will be to go through reading the questions thoroughly, and marking the answers I am at least 75% sure of. For the questions I do not have an immediate response to, I am going to just take my best guess and mark it (not spending more than 1 minute on those), and then at the end with all my extra time I am going to go through those and really try to figure them out. That way I'll at least have the "easy" ones answered right and I should have time to rationalize those that require lots of thought. Anyway, that's my plan. What are you going to do?

It's going to be so hard for me not to change answers, so I am just going to limit myself to looking twice at those I am really not sure about (the marked ones)

 

[Stinger86]

On an average block, I spent about 25 minutes going through all the questions once. If there were any that were really complicated or had a ton of info to analyze, I would mark them and move on. I would then spend about 5-10 minutes going back to the marked questions and completing them. Then lastly I would go back to question 1 and just quickly skim all 50 questions and make sure that the answer keyed is the same answer I had originally intended to key.

As far as changing answers goes, once I thought through a question and answered it, I refused to change it. Mainly because I'm the kind of person who will correctly answer a question initially, but then overanalyze it and ultimately change the answer to a wrong choice.

 

[Clair de Lune]

Not to be nosy, but how did you end up doing using this technique?

 

[Stinger86]

Not to be nosy, but how did you end up doing using this technique?

I felt that I did really well, but I won't know definitively for another two weeks or something like that.

 

[Clair de Lune]

Good job! Let us know how it turns out. It must be nice to be you right now, finished with the step 1 and actually feeling good about it! 🙂

 

[DrDre']

Stinger,
did you find it hard to monitor how you were doing? I found it difficult to have a reasonable idea of how many I missed. The questions blurred together.
Any thoughts?

 

[Stinger86]

Stinger,
did you find it hard to monitor how you were doing? I found it difficult to have a reasonable idea of how many I missed. The questions blurred together.
Any thoughts?

There were probably about 5-10 questions per block that I marked and sat there thinking "good lord, what do they want?" If I was nearly sure or completely sure that I got a question correct, I would not mark it and would just basically forget it even existed. That way I could focus on the marked questions I didn't understand very well. And I used only those tough questions to gauge how I was doing, since I was really gunning for this exam's jugular.

And then of course I kept those hard questions in mind, so when I went home I could look the answers up and see how many I got correct. The reason I think I did really well is because I found that I got most of those tough questions correct. Couple those with the 40 or so other questions per block that I was almost positive I got correct, and you'll understand why I'm optimistic 😉 . But for all I know, some of those easy questions could've been tricky questions in disguise (the NBME shelf exams had tons like these.... very well written), and I might have tanked them. Again with the -->