For anyone has taken the exam recently, how many questions did you get that you would say were completely unrelated to anything found in FA and UWorld?
What is the best way to cover this material...just do as many questions in all the qbanks available?
Also what areas of Uworld or FA would you say are weakest for covering topics on the exam...ie. Uworld - reproductive, behavioral, renal- not as many questions in these areas...
First of all, on multiple levels, no one can answer this question. People get different exams. Period. Therefore there's no true gauge as to what percentage of the real deal is going to come straight from UWorld or FA. There is also no way to calculate what % will be repro vs micro vs anatomy. It's all luck.
Secondly,
a lot of stuff that shows up on people's exams that they think wasn't in FA, is. How do I know that? My exam's in 8 days, and I've done somewhere around 16,000 unique practice questions and have read FA 3x. I do not prevaricate when I say that, even during the final few thousand Qs, there were times I would think I had encountered some esoteria, and then I'd flip to FA and it was there all along. The point is: there's a lot in FA that your eyes just see but don't process, even if you've read the text several times. This mostly refers to unbolded text written as side-effects of drugs or as excess info regarding some disease process; then what that "obscure" practice question will do, is take that text you hadn't really processed and actually transform it into a larger concept you have to psychoanalyze, and then you get it wrong because you think you've never seen the info before.
Your best bet is to:
1) When you read FA, don't just read it; look off into space after you read a few lines and think about what's written in there, process it and memorize it. You're not going to be able to do this all on one pass. In fact, even after three passes, you might know close to the whole book, but there will always be small gaps, no matter who (or what) you are.
2) Yes, do as many practice questions as possible. This, quite frankly, never fully increases your ability to get the WTF questions (i.e. some recondite MRI that you could have never anticipated having been tested) as much as it does solidify that you get all of the easy ones correct (given that you don't make stupid mistakes, which we all do unfortunately). Regarding WTF questions, even if you don't know the correct answer 100%, if you've seen a lot of questions before, you're more likely to eliminate the wrong answers.
As you do more questions, you begin to know the answer sometimes within seconds of seeing the stem (of course you still read it to make sure it's no trick), so
this also helps hugely with time efficiency. With UWorld, I had probably 10-15 minutes left at the end of each block (some blocks 5 minutes, others 20 minutes); with the recent NBMEs I've done, I've had about a half hour left at the end of each block! So questions are really good for improving your rapid recall and therefore giving you flexibility to spend more time on the harder/puzzle questions that are the real maker or breakers.
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That's probably a more extensive response than you were expecting. Usually the first post I respond to in the morning gets the bulk of my energy for the day.
