Hey guys and girls! I'm curious as to how people felt after taking Step 1. I mean everything you felt within the following 24 hours of the exam. I'm not wanting to read about the test strategies of students finding ways to tell everyone they got a 250+. I want to know what you felt like BEFORE receiving your score, and if how you felt after the exam reflected your ultimate score (no need to post numbers). I just took mine yesterday morning, and am very worried about what my results will show. Basically I'm looking for hope that I didn't invest $200,000 in school and the majority of my prime life for nothing.
I studied for the average 4-5 weeks (albeit not as thoroughly as some because I was in the middle of moving...3 times, and had a lot of other issues on my chest to deal with).
I made detailed note cards on everything while reading FA and studied those flashcards instead of reading FA multiples times (because reading a book repeatedly seems ineffecient to me). I felt I knew first aid decently enough to pass. My first NBME form equated to aroud 214 (form 7), and my second one (form 5), was around a 224. I did both on timed not tutorial (because the real test doesn't give you 20 hours for a few hundred questions). Using formulas I found online, my cumulative qbank estimated my score to be between 219-226. My last 7 quizzes estimated it to be 226-232 (all qbank was done on timed mode and only once, because once again I don't see the point in doing otherwise). So my nbme scores and my average (60%-65%) on first time qbank puts me a lot lower than the posters on here who talk about getting 80-90% correct and going through FA and Qbank 4-5 times. Every qbank quiz, I was confident in my answers or knew the subject fairly well. According to their values, my quizzes were always above their calculated averages. I thought qbank was relatively direct, despite hearing that it was more difficult than the step. Because of this, I was confident that I'd definitely pass the exam.
That being said, I took my exam. I am weak in renal. I studied it the hardest the day before my exam to have it fresh. The first block of 46 questions had 35+ renal questions that all started with a generic "person X has dysuria/polyuria and here are 145 lab results. Which of the following 15 diseases is it?". Occasionally there was a picture of something that could point to 5-6 diseases. Half the renal questions included a history of an array of 4-5 various nephrotoxic drugs that cause different types of renal disease. I panicked, I don't even know 35 renal diseases. I marked 26-30 questions on block one (I mark somewhat leniently). More than 25-30 questions on each block were renal for the first 6 blocks. The rest was artery anatomy and ethics. I don't know vague artery anatomy. I thought the exam was a very very poor representation of medicine. Entire core subjects were not on the exam at all. I almost got up and left.
I also was very very rushed, to the point that if an answer looked too time-costly, I just clicked something and marked it in hopes of using that time to answer a question I was confident about. I find it hard to believe that most of these posters bragged about having 15-20 minutes left to review. In the last 5 seconds, I counted all my lenient markings and they totalled around 130. Which is 40% of the test. since most of those questions were 4-5 multiple choice answers, pure guessing would give me back around 30 questions. I went back through FA, and found around 25 of those questions (17 I think I answered correctly). The other 300 questions I wouldn't even know how to Google an answer, and half of them were not remotely covered in first aid. They had too much extemporaneous labs and details, that it made me question whether or not basic stuff pertained to the question. It was a huge waste of time looking up obscure lab values to see whether or not they signified disease ( most of the labs ended up normal). There were a lot of "what's the greatest risk" or "what's the most likely..." questions that I think are as useless in real medicine as memorizing 100000 path words like "pallasading nuclei" before being taught that the disease might present with purple skin and 16 eyeballs.
I know some people take a test leaving confident because they knew so little that they couldn't understand how another answer could be right, and others leave in utter hopelessness because they know too much that all answers can be explained. I don't think I'm either. I hear that 10-20% of questions are "experimental" but am not sure where people are getting that information. Overall worst-case scenario I feel like I didn't know 40-50% of the exam. Most posts I find are arguments on what the passing percent score is, a lot of people throw out 70-80% correct. But I find that very hard to believe since qbank average is a 58% and that includes people who spent 4 hours on each quiz. Is this test supposed to make you think you failed? Medical students refuse to acknowledge to other med students that they felt like failing anything, so I figured a more anonymous site like this would give me realistic answers.
I studied for the average 4-5 weeks (albeit not as thoroughly as some because I was in the middle of moving...3 times, and had a lot of other issues on my chest to deal with).
I made detailed note cards on everything while reading FA and studied those flashcards instead of reading FA multiples times (because reading a book repeatedly seems ineffecient to me). I felt I knew first aid decently enough to pass. My first NBME form equated to aroud 214 (form 7), and my second one (form 5), was around a 224. I did both on timed not tutorial (because the real test doesn't give you 20 hours for a few hundred questions). Using formulas I found online, my cumulative qbank estimated my score to be between 219-226. My last 7 quizzes estimated it to be 226-232 (all qbank was done on timed mode and only once, because once again I don't see the point in doing otherwise). So my nbme scores and my average (60%-65%) on first time qbank puts me a lot lower than the posters on here who talk about getting 80-90% correct and going through FA and Qbank 4-5 times. Every qbank quiz, I was confident in my answers or knew the subject fairly well. According to their values, my quizzes were always above their calculated averages. I thought qbank was relatively direct, despite hearing that it was more difficult than the step. Because of this, I was confident that I'd definitely pass the exam.
That being said, I took my exam. I am weak in renal. I studied it the hardest the day before my exam to have it fresh. The first block of 46 questions had 35+ renal questions that all started with a generic "person X has dysuria/polyuria and here are 145 lab results. Which of the following 15 diseases is it?". Occasionally there was a picture of something that could point to 5-6 diseases. Half the renal questions included a history of an array of 4-5 various nephrotoxic drugs that cause different types of renal disease. I panicked, I don't even know 35 renal diseases. I marked 26-30 questions on block one (I mark somewhat leniently). More than 25-30 questions on each block were renal for the first 6 blocks. The rest was artery anatomy and ethics. I don't know vague artery anatomy. I thought the exam was a very very poor representation of medicine. Entire core subjects were not on the exam at all. I almost got up and left.
I also was very very rushed, to the point that if an answer looked too time-costly, I just clicked something and marked it in hopes of using that time to answer a question I was confident about. I find it hard to believe that most of these posters bragged about having 15-20 minutes left to review. In the last 5 seconds, I counted all my lenient markings and they totalled around 130. Which is 40% of the test. since most of those questions were 4-5 multiple choice answers, pure guessing would give me back around 30 questions. I went back through FA, and found around 25 of those questions (17 I think I answered correctly). The other 300 questions I wouldn't even know how to Google an answer, and half of them were not remotely covered in first aid. They had too much extemporaneous labs and details, that it made me question whether or not basic stuff pertained to the question. It was a huge waste of time looking up obscure lab values to see whether or not they signified disease ( most of the labs ended up normal). There were a lot of "what's the greatest risk" or "what's the most likely..." questions that I think are as useless in real medicine as memorizing 100000 path words like "pallasading nuclei" before being taught that the disease might present with purple skin and 16 eyeballs.
I know some people take a test leaving confident because they knew so little that they couldn't understand how another answer could be right, and others leave in utter hopelessness because they know too much that all answers can be explained. I don't think I'm either. I hear that 10-20% of questions are "experimental" but am not sure where people are getting that information. Overall worst-case scenario I feel like I didn't know 40-50% of the exam. Most posts I find are arguments on what the passing percent score is, a lot of people throw out 70-80% correct. But I find that very hard to believe since qbank average is a 58% and that includes people who spent 4 hours on each quiz. Is this test supposed to make you think you failed? Medical students refuse to acknowledge to other med students that they felt like failing anything, so I figured a more anonymous site like this would give me realistic answers.
