I always struggle

[taeyeonlover]

I am an M2 student. I just keep struggling on exams and quizzes in my classes so it’s really frustrating. I’m pretty sure I am at the bottom of the class and I almost failed a module. I took an exam today and I scored below average. Everyone in my class gets either A or B in classes and yet I always get Cs.

I study literally all day everyday in the library going through lecture powerpoints to make sure I learn and understand everything after listening to recorded lectures. I don’t use anki because I just don’t have time in the day because going through powerpoints already takes up too much of my time.

I tried taking notes to make an outline of lectures but I don’t have time for that either. Also, I never really look at them again.

I basically go through all of the lectures maybe 3-5 times before exams or quizzes. I also do some of the practice problems that the faculty provides. I also do sketchy of the relevant topics and that seems to be helpful.

Studying all day everyday takes up so much of my time that I don’t even have time to exercise.

It seems that I always perform badly in exams if the exam covers a lot of materials. If it’s a small quiz on only couple lectures, I have no problem doing well.

What should I do?


How do I make my studying more active? Am I studying too much?

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[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

You’re studying in a very inefficient manner. Reading and watching/listening to lectures are the two most passive methods of learning except maybe sleeping on the text book. Time spaced learning and questions are key to retention. Anki isn’t the only option for the former, but it’s the most popular because it sets up the time-spaced part for you. There are premade decks to save you more time, but you could also use a deck made by classmates for your school or make your own cards (this can take a lot of time, so I recommend just using a premade deck and then skimming the powerpoints to add cards for things they seem to hammer on that aren’t in the premade deck).

Then you need to do lots and lots of questions. That is your biggest moneymaker for improving grades. The number of flashcards you need to do to get the same improvement is a factor of ten larger than the number of questions. You can use uworld, but the general consensus is to save uworld for dedicated. I used usmle Rx and thought it was great.

 

[Nugester]

Hey! M2 here too. First off, don't compare yourself to your classmates. Second, it is an exaggeration that everyone is rocking As/Bs except you. I can't say it will work for you but here is my method:

1. Watch lectures at 2-2.5x speed
2. Skim the PowerPoints
3. Read the corresponding topics via AMBOSS
4. Do practice Qs from AMBOSS
5. ANKI - the spaced repetition really helps me retain the material and I use it as a supplement to learn class material. It is also great that I can read FirstAid too in the extras section
*6. Speaking with my classmates, others use BnB, Pathoma, Sketchy etc. I used to do this too, but found it a huge time sink/resource overload so I stopped and my grades haven't suffered. I also found that I couldn't retain information from watching videos. Cutting this out I created more time for hobbies/exercise etc.

If anything, do practice Qs, improve test taking skills (if needed) and active recall (understanding the material (?) heh). I know once I started second year, I had to finally draw diagrams and write things down over and over to remember drugs, neuro pathways etc. Good luck!

 

[taeyeonlover]

Hey! M2 here too. First off, don't compare yourself to your classmates. Second, it is an exaggeration that everyone is rocking As/Bs except you. I can't say it will work for you but here is my method:

1. Watch lectures at 2-2.5x speed
2. Skim the PowerPoints
3. Read the corresponding topics via AMBOSS
4. Do practice Qs from AMBOSS
5. ANKI - the spaced repetition really helps me retain the material and I use it as a supplement to learn class material. It is also great that I can read FirstAid too in the extras section
*6. Speaking with my classmates, others use BnB, Pathoma, Sketchy etc. I used to do this too, but found it a huge time sink/resource overload so I stopped and my grades haven't suffered. Also, I found more time for hobbies/exercise etc. once I stopped #6 too.

If anything, do practice Qs, improve test taking skills (if needed), and active recall (understanding the material (?) heh). I know once I started second year, I had to finally draw diagrams and write things down over and over to remember drugs, neuro pathways etc. Good luck!

Thank you! I have amboss account too.

It’s not an exaggeration because the faculty sends out the distribution of grades after each module ends to show how many people got As and Bs etc.

 

[taeyeonlover]

You’re studying in a very inefficient manner. Reading and watching/listening to lectures are the two most passive methods of learning except maybe sleeping on the text book. Time spaced learning and questions are key to retention. Anki isn’t the only option for the former, but it’s the most popular because it sets up the time-spaced part for you. There are premade decks to save you more time, but you could also use a deck made by classmates for your school or make your own cards (this can take a lot of time, so I recommend just using a premade deck and then skimming the powerpoints to add cards for things they seem to hammer on that aren’t in the premade deck).

Then you need to do lots and lots of questions. That is your biggest moneymaker for improving grades. The number of flashcards you need to do to get the same improvement is a factor of ten larger than the number of questions. You can use uworld, but the general consensus is to save uworld for dedicated. I used usmle Rx and thought it was great.

I’m just curious. Why do some people not recommend doing uworld before dedicated? Will it have a negative impact on step 1 studying?

 

[Deltasidearm]

I’m just curious. Why do some people not recommend doing uworld before dedicated? Will it have a negative impact on step 1 studying?

At least for me, my short-term memory is strong enough that there's a good chance I will remember the correct answer instead of knowing the content if I repeat practice questions at all. That is why I'm saving UWorld until I'm ready for dedicated studying, when it will be my primary method. Until then, it's been anki + Lippincott's Q&A + BRS practice problems + BnB quizzes for me (I'm too cheap to sub to an actual qbank until dedicated).

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

I’m just curious. Why do some people not recommend doing uworld before dedicated? Will it have a negative impact on step 1 studying?

Most people will be able to remember a fair amount of the questions, and it will be more of a spaced repetition type thing rather than a novel question. It really doesn’t matter as long as you are doing a different qbank for dedicated than you did for class. It’s just that most people recommend using uworld for dedicated because it’s the gold standard.

 

[Styrene]

I recommend uworld. If you don't want to use uworld, I recommend usmle-rx qbank. Just do questions and learn from the answer explanations. If the tests in class are fairly standardized and representative of nbme, this is all that is needed for studying. If they are in-house tests with many arcane facts and not representative of nbme, then I'm not sure.

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

I recommend uworld. If you don't want to use uworld, I recommend usmle-rx qbank. Just do questions and learn from the answer explanations. If the tests in class are fairly standardized and representative of nbme, this is all that is needed for studying. If they are in-house tests with many arcane facts and not representative of nbme, then I'm not sure.

We had both faculty and nbme exams in preclerkship. Usmle rx was still sufficient for the faculty exams as far as questions went.

 

[lumya]

Does your school have a learning specialist or someone who can help you identify better ways to study?

I would also advocate for still finding time to sleep well and exercise - personally I find that my mental and physical well-being plays a huge role in how well I can learn and retain material.

 

[stickgirl390]

You’ve already correctly identified your issue: too much passive learning, not enough active. You are tested in an active fashion (MCQ), so that is how you should practice.

I agree with the above recs to do more practice questions like uworld, Amboss, sketchy, boards and beyond, etc. If you haven’t given Anki a fair shot yet, I think it’s time to try it. Your current method obviously isn’t working, so don’t try and fit anki in with PPT review: just ditch the PPTs beyond one pass at 2x speed, because they obviously aren’t helping you. Good luck!

 

[Deltasidearm]

We had both faculty and nbme exams in preclerkship. Usmle rx was still sufficient for the faculty exams as far as questions went.

n +1.

 

[Damson]

haven't fully read the thread but my two cents is

practice questions
anki or flashcards, daily.
go through lectures once or twice enough

 

[deleted1100659]

exam success= time x efficiency^2.

Increasing one will increase your score, but increasing the second variable will give you the most dramatic results. If you're putting in the time then theres an issue with what you're doing during that time, and you may be missing the main points/key details.

 

[Billiam95]

Does your school have a learning specialist or someone who can help you identify better ways to study?

I would also advocate for still finding time to sleep well and exercise - personally I find that my mental and physical well-being plays a huge role in how well I can learn and retain material.

I've yet to hear of a learning specialist worth their salary, tbh. How can you tell medical students how to study if you've never been to medical school? Other students have always been my best resource for learning how to study.

 

[Styrene]

We had both faculty and nbme exams in preclerkship. Usmle rx was still sufficient for the faculty exams as far as questions went.

That's helpful information. Thank you.

 

[Styrene]

I've yet to hear of a learning specialist worth their salary, tbh. How can you tell medical students how to study if you've never been to medical school? Other students have always been my best resource for learning how to study.

Teaching and application of learning strategies based in general principles of learning theory should be helpful across learning environments.

 

[Chelsea FC]

I am an M2 student. I just keep struggling on exams and quizzes in my classes so it’s really frustrating. I’m pretty sure I am at the bottom of the class and I almost failed a module. I took an exam today and I scored below average. Everyone in my class gets either A or B in classes and yet I always get Cs.

I study literally all day everyday in the library going through lecture powerpoints to make sure I learn and understand everything after listening to recorded lectures. I don’t use anki because I just don’t have time in the day because going through powerpoints already takes up too much of my time.

I tried taking notes to make an outline of lectures but I don’t have time for that either. Also, I never really look at them again.

I basically go through all of the lectures maybe 3-5 times before exams or quizzes. I also do some of the practice problems that the faculty provides. I also do sketchy of the relevant topics and that seems to be helpful.

Studying all day everyday takes up so much of my time that I don’t even have time to exercise.

It seems that I always perform badly in exams if the exam covers a lot of materials. If it’s a small quiz on only couple lectures, I have no problem doing well.

What should I do?


How do I make my studying more active? Am I studying too much?

I did the same thing and struggled, luckily for me I really kicked butt in clinical and got honors all of 3rd and 4th year. It may not happen for you but maybe your skill is working with a team and clinical learning. At the end of the day I had very experience to you and I pushed through to the end and graduating soon. So I’m saying if u really want this don’t make these exams break you!!

 

[Lawpy]

I did the same thing and struggled, luckily for me I really kicked butt in clinical and got honors all of 3rd and 4th year. It may not happen for you but maybe your skill is working with a team and clinical learning. At the end of the day I had very experience to you and I pushed through to the end and graduating soon. So I’m saying if u really want this don’t make these exams break you!!

The most important skill to have imo

 

[TragicalDrFaust]

Lots of people saying practice questions and anki here do wanted to jump in and say that I go to all classes and study 90% from the in house lectures. Switching from anki to this strategy brought me from barely passing to high B’s and low A’s. The most important thing to take away here is everyone learns differently. The only constants are active learning > passive learning and spaced repetition > cramming, which are consistently backed by evidence. Anki and practice questions are active learning but not ideal for everyone for all subjects. So active learning is the best but not all kinds of active learning are suited to all individuals.

You can also learn actively from in house lectures using the Feynman Method which is going through the lectures and then pretending you’re going to teach them to a person with no medical background. Your goal is to be able to explain the topic cold without looking at the source material. I do this and try to get a pass within a few days of the live lecture and then one more closer to the date of the test.

I believe only a very small minority of people have to study for more than 7-8 hours per day. Most people who do more are driving themselves into the ground using inefficient methods or even efficient methods that aren’t ideal for them.

Check in with a learning specialist or two at your school. The self selection bias of SDN means that you’re not getting a realistic picture of how all medical students study. The feedback will likely be more useful to you if you can sit down with someone for 30 mins and discuss your strengths, weaknesses, preferences and other patterns.

For the record I agree with everyone’s advice, most people do well with practice questions. Personally I wouldn’t be able to bank on them though because not all our in house exams match up with boards. A learning specialist at your school would also have insight into how high yield board style practice questions are for students at your particular school.

Edit for clarity

 

[butidontwantto]

Hey there! Another M2 here. As others have said, finding a way to make your learning more active is the best step forward. The best way to take that step forward though is going vary a lot depending on your learning styles as well as what your school thinks is important (and if you're in a school like mine what the school thinks is important is going to vary from lecturer to lecturer...). Checking in with your learning services team is a good idea. They should be familiar with what's going on at your school, and they should also have some tools to help you figure out your learning style. But also, you know your brain best, so if one of their suggestions sounds like it isn't going to work for you that's ok. Our learning services team is generally great, but at the beginning of first year they laid out a weekly study plan template and stressed that it was the best way to structure your week. I took one look at it and went there's no way my brain will function if my week is structured like this. I sorted it out my own way and it's been fine. Here's what's been working for me:

- at the beginning of the week watch through the prerecorded lectures at 1.25/1.5 speed, mostly to get an overview of what we're talking about and listen for any hints at what they think is important

- look for those topics in Pathoma. Watch those videos while taking my own notes in the book. There's been some research that handwriting your notes helps you to learn things better. I think the theory is that you write slower than you type, so by handwriting you're going slower. By going slower it forces you to summarize, and the act of summarizing helps concepts stick in your brain better. I use Pathoma for this because it's relatively cheap, it's clear, and it's small (the book is just 200 pgs - way less overwhelming than other resources).

- unlock the related Anki cards from the AnKing deck (there's a bunch of videos on how to use the AnKing deck - worth looking into over Thanksgiving/winter break if you haven't yet)

- fill in any blank spots after pathoma with other resources as needed, but I start with ones that already have tagged cards in the AnKing deck

- do my best to pay attention in class, again taking handwritten notes (this time on a tablet, but the same principle applies), ideally on the slides they're presenting but that only works if they give them to us

- when it comes time to study for an exam I make a lot of tables to summarize the information, e.g. column 1 list all the ovarian tumors, column 2 what type are they (germ cell, epithelial, etc), column 3 major histological findings ("fried-egg", Schiller-Duval, etc), column 4-n whatever other categories are important for this specific topic. Again, handwriting is more useful than typing. I use a big white board poster that sticks to the wall.

- leading up the exam doing practice questions and batting cleanup on any memorization I still need to bully into my brain. If the school gives you practice questions, do those. If not, Amboss is great. Boards and beyond, sketchy, and osmosis all have practice questions as well. BRS (Board Review Series) is also a good source of questions (check to see if your library has them before you buy them!).

And last but not least, try not to compare yourself to your classmates! You're passing, which is great! Step 1 is pass/fail now, so all you need to do is get that P. You've got this!

 

[calivianya]

I typically read my lecture ppts starting 2-3 days before the test, and woke up super early and skimmed them 1x the morning of, and that was the entirety of my exposure to lectures. IMO, that’s all the time you should be spending on lectures. I found that mine were not as board relevant as they could be, so I didn’t care about them. Spend the rest of your time on third-party services - premade Anki decks, B&B, pathoma, etc. You are spending far too much time on lectures.

My final class rank was in the top 1/4, so never watching a lecture and never doing more than cramming a lecture the day before and the day of a test worked just fine. The board materials cover the things you will be seeing in class far more efficiently than any lecture. You can pick up the random points you wouldn’t have seen on a third-party app through the 2x skimming in the couple of nights before the test, because you really only need to commit this material to your short-term memory. Don’t worry about learning it long-term. The board review stuff is what you need to put in your long-term memory.

 

[taeyeonlover]

You’re studying in a very inefficient manner. Reading and watching/listening to lectures are the two most passive methods of learning except maybe sleeping on the text book. Time spaced learning and questions are key to retention. Anki isn’t the only option for the former, but it’s the most popular because it sets up the time-spaced part for you. There are premade decks to save you more time, but you could also use a deck made by classmates for your school or make your own cards (this can take a lot of time, so I recommend just using a premade deck and then skimming the powerpoints to add cards for things they seem to hammer on that aren’t in the premade deck).

Then you need to do lots and lots of questions. That is your biggest moneymaker for improving grades. The number of flashcards you need to do to get the same improvement is a factor of ten larger than the number of questions. You can use uworld, but the general consensus is to save uworld for dedicated. I used usmle Rx and thought it was great.

Thank you! my final exam for this exam is next week. So at this point would my #1 priority over anything else like anki, sketchy, lecture etc be doing as many practice questions as possible using uworld or whatever and going over them thoroughly?

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

Thank you! my final exam for this exam is next week. So at this point would my #1 priority over anything else like anki, sketchy, lecture etc be doing as many practice questions as possible using uworld or whatever and going over them thoroughly?

If you could only do one thing, the most high yield would be as many questions as you can while making sure you understand the explanations for each right and wrong answer choice.

 

[zhuang]

I am an M2 student. I just keep struggling on exams and quizzes in my classes so it’s really frustrating. I’m pretty sure I am at the bottom of the class and I almost failed a module. I took an exam today and I scored below average. Everyone in my class gets either A or B in classes and yet I always get Cs.

I study literally all day everyday in the library going through lecture powerpoints to make sure I learn and understand everything after listening to recorded lectures. I don’t use anki because I just don’t have time in the day because going through powerpoints already takes up too much of my time.

I tried taking notes to make an outline of lectures but I don’t have time for that either. Also, I never really look at them again.

I basically go through all of the lectures maybe 3-5 times before exams or quizzes. I also do some of the practice problems that the faculty provides. I also do sketchy of the relevant topics and that seems to be helpful.

Studying all day everyday takes up so much of my time that I don’t even have time to exercise.

It seems that I always perform badly in exams if the exam covers a lot of materials. If it’s a small quiz on only couple lectures, I have no problem doing well.

What should I do?


How do I make my studying more active? Am I studying too much?

Please try to do as many practice questions before the class and after the class. This way you will be focusing on the most important content and you will do well for the exams. If you have time you can do the third pass for the practice questions. Do not go to the class as it wastes your time. You can review the slides at faster pace. Keep trying don’t give up. Do as many practice questions as you can!

 

[mistafab]

My reply is that you need to prioritize your rest just as much as you prioritize your active work.

If you study all day every day - you are wasting your time and making yourself miserable. Happy/healthy people are more successful long term. You'll be more effective during your studies if you give yourself strict cutoffs. For example, you may decide to work from 9-12, and 1-6pm M-F, with 9-1 on Saturday. Stick to your boundaries - It will be beneficial for your physical and mental health.