is this a unique board experience

[Milhouse Van Houten]

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it seems like everyone on this board says that the usmle was much more straightforward than qbank, and about as difficult as the nbme released items. however, i took the test i can honestly say it was freaking harder than anything i've ever seen. i don't know if i just got a harder test than most people or if it just seemed harder because i was actually taking the real thing that day, but i honestly studied my arse off for this test and went in feeling relatively confident--in stark contrast to how i felt leaving the test.
my breakdown was
25%-->i know this, this is simple
45%-->i should know this, but for some reason i can't figure it out
30%!!!!!-->i have NO freaking clue what you are talking about

i mean, i finished qbank 50 question sets with loads of time left, yet on the real thing i didn't get to review a single question, and i always felt rushed towards the end. literally 30% of these questions were so far out there that i started to wonder if anyone in the world could answer them. for example (and i am making this question up, but it is similar in spirit) they would give you a bunch of lab values for the heart (CO, HR, SV, etc...) and then ask you to calculate the "forced contractile entropy" or the "inversion factor" or the "sliding ectopic ratio." where the hell do they get these questions???? even my anatomy questions were ridiculous, and i got 5 parasites/worms!!!!!!!!! literally, i have no idea if i passed. but i could have done well if everyone else thought it was ridiculous. ANY SIMILIAR EXPERIENCES FROM YOU OUT THERE???

 

[DrDre']

I feel for you. it is discouraging to feel so scared after such preparation. My test was not quite as extreme, but I was indeed concerned, still am.

I am sure if they were as bad as you describe that 50 of the ones you missed were all trial questions! Hopefully, your score above that is great. Try not to analyse while you wait for your scores. If you prepared well, I am sure you will be fine.


Good luck!

 

[fernj1975]

Well, remember that you are graded based on the performance of those who have had the same questions. You sounded very prepared so I probably assume that everyone else who had those questions probably felt the same way. Good luck, you probably did fine.

 

[PACtoDOC]

You did fine Mil. relax and take a few days for it all to sink in. It has taken me 2 weeks to finally feel like I did well. At first I felt like I had bombed it but them I started reading FA and realized I got a lot right!! If your test was that hard it will reflect in your curve!! Good luck and congratulations on making it to this point.

 

[VALSALVA]

To the OP: I had a very similar exam experience. Neither Q-bank or the NBME released or dx test question sets prepared me for my exam. I could have studied for a year and not done any better. Hello?...I'm not an MD/Ph.D student!!! Hopefully I passed.

 

[8744]

it seems like everyone on this board says that the usmle was much more straightforward than qbank, and about as difficult as the nbme released items. however, i took the test i can honestly say it was freaking harder than anything i've ever seen. i don't know if i just got a harder test than most people or if it just seemed harder because i was actually taking the real thing that day, but i honestly studied my arse off for this test and went in feeling relatively confident--in stark contrast to how i felt leaving the test.
my breakdown was
25%-->i know this, this is simple
45%-->i should know this, but for some reason i can't figure it out
30%!!!!!-->i have NO freaking clue what you are talking about

i mean, i finished qbank 50 question sets with loads of time left, yet on the real thing i didn't get to review a single question, and i always felt rushed towards the end. literally 30% of these questions were so far out there that i started to wonder if anyone in the world could answer them. for example (and i am making this question up, but it is similar in spirit) they would give you a bunch of lab values for the heart (CO, HR, SV, etc...) and then ask you to calculate the "forced contractile entropy" or the "inversion factor" or the "sliding ectopic ratio." where the hell do they get these questions???? even my anatomy questions were ridiculous, and i got 5 parasites/worms!!!!!!!!! literally, i have no idea if i passed. but i could have done well if everyone else thought it was ridiculous. ANY SIMILIAR EXPERIENCES FROM YOU OUT THERE???

Don't worry. I took Step 1 a little over a year ago and I still remember walking out of it thinking there was no way in hell I was going to pass. There were maybe twenty questions on the whole test to which I knew the answer absolutley and did not have to think about. The rest were a combination of things I thought I knew, things I knew I should know but couldn't recall, and a few things I had never seen before.

I passed and got a respectable score (I beat the mean by 2 points with a 219.)

 

[GiJoe]

Well, remember that you are graded based on the performance of those who have had the same questions. You sounded very prepared so I probably assume that everyone else who had those questions probably felt the same way. Good luck, you probably did fine.

umm... i never heard about this. everyone gets a different bunch of random questions...sometimes questions may overlap but nobody gets the same test.

 

[mnms]

hey mil,

i had the exact same experience w/ my test that i took last weds. you're right. it was significantly harder than any of the practice tests available to us (qbank, nbme, released). the questions were longer and more involved. almost each question had a set of lab values that you may/may not have needed for the answer. only bout 25% were gimmies, 60% were medium difficulty levels that required lots of reading, and information sifting. it seemed that these questions gave you more information than was necessary. in fact, i found myself just skipping over the "story" in each question and just looking at the main question stem to find out what the hell was being asked.

on top of the difficulty of the test itself, i didn't get a good night's rest before taking the test. so, my brain felt like wet cotton. i was sitting down thinking to myself, "ok, i'll have to be pulled for surgery rotation and that'll set me back a few months, but oh well, i kinda like the class of 2007 anyway." i couldn't fall asleep for like 2 hrs after hitting the sack which left me with only 5 or 6 hrs of sleep. and, i know that if i don't have 8 solid before a big test, i consistently perform poorly the next day.

any way, i was really disappointed with myself and am still on pins and needles even after having checked through FA and found at least some of the questions to be right (some also to be wrong as i had suspected). i'm hoping for the best - just passing because right now, i'm planing on retaking the thing. oh well, i did my best, let's see how things turn out.

 

[gmendese]

I'd pretty much have to agree with everyone. I took the test yesterday, and there were plenty of questions I didn't have a clue about! They mainly dealt with mol bio/lab techniques or obscure diseases. But, when I think about it, I guess there weren't a TON of mol bio/lab questions...I guess they just stuck in my mind because they were hard and I had no clue. All in all, the test is most comparable to q-bank and NOT the released items. I think it was similar to the kaplan full-length to be honest...plenty you know, several things you have no clue about, and other things that when you're reading the vignette, you know the disease, but you struggle with the answer choices (so fun!).

I just hope everyone who took it with me felt the same way! Good luck, everyone!

Gary

 

[DrSmiles]

My test was ridiculously hard as well. So hard that I seriously thought they gave me the wrong test at one point, and I kept thinking I am NOT a frickin' MD/PHD WHY are they asking me this???
It makes me feel better to hear that I wasn't the only one in the entire world that got such a hard exam- because other people I have talked to said it wasn't so bad or they only had about 5 molecular bio/biochem questions.

 

[dr2b0804]

You all have sufficiently scared me to death, as my step 2 is only a couple of weeks away. I'm currently about to start an elective that has pathology incorporated into it...guess that might be a good thing after all since it incorporates histology and stains and things. Gosh, I better get back to studying...good luck to all of you! 😱

 

[cardioboy]

hey dr smiles based on ur experience what did you finally score

 

[Back34]

it seems like everyone on this board says that the usmle was much more straightforward than qbank, and about as difficult as the nbme released items. however, i took the test i can honestly say it was freaking harder than anything i've ever seen. i don't know if i just got a harder test than most people or if it just seemed harder because i was actually taking the real thing that day, but i honestly studied my arse off for this test and went in feeling relatively confident--in stark contrast to how i felt leaving the test.
my breakdown was
25%-->i know this, this is simple
45%-->i should know this, but for some reason i can't figure it out
30%!!!!!-->i have NO freaking clue what you are talking about

i mean, i finished qbank 50 question sets with loads of time left, yet on the real thing i didn't get to review a single question, and i always felt rushed towards the end. literally 30% of these questions were so far out there that i started to wonder if anyone in the world could answer them. for example (and i am making this question up, but it is similar in spirit) they would give you a bunch of lab values for the heart (CO, HR, SV, etc...) and then ask you to calculate the "forced contractile entropy" or the "inversion factor" or the "sliding ectopic ratio." where the hell do they get these questions???? even my anatomy questions were ridiculous, and i got 5 parasites/worms!!!!!!!!! literally, i have no idea if i passed. but i could have done well if everyone else thought it was ridiculous. ANY SIMILIAR EXPERIENCES FROM YOU OUT THERE???

Nice to hear I'm not the only one who walked away from Step I with a big load of sh#$ in my pants. I did half of the qbank questions and averaged about 64% when all was said and done. Moved on to both self - assessment exams and hit average on both of them. I could care less about derm, ophtho, and what have you, so average suited me just fine.

In retrospect, the only thing I had going for me was complete relaxation going into the exam. Like the OP, about a quarter of the questions were gimmies, half I could narrow down to 2 or 3 choices and make my most educated guess, and a quarter were the WTF type questions. I left feeling pretty beaten up and was sure I didn't even get half of the damn things right. I still haven't gotten my scores, but feel a little more confident that I'm not alone in my sentiment.

Thus, for me, Step I was MUCH more difficult than either qbank or the self - assessment exams, in terms of difficulty and the types of questions asked, i.e., LOTS of anatomy and neuro.

 

[daisygirl]

Nice to hear I'm not the only one who walked away from Step I with a big load of sh#$ in my pants. I did half of the qbank questions and averaged about 64% when all was said and done. Moved on to both self - assessment exams and hit average on both of them. I could care less about derm, ophtho, and what have you, so average suited me just fine.

In retrospect, the only thing I had going for me was complete relaxation going into the exam. Like the OP, about a quarter of the questions were gimmies, half I could narrow down to 2 or 3 choices and make my most educated guess, and a quarter were the WTF type questions. I left feeling pretty beaten up and was sure I didn't even get half of the damn things right. I still haven't gotten my scores, but feel a little more confident that I'm not alone in my sentiment.

Thus, for me, Step I was MUCH more difficult than either qbank or the self - assessment exams, in terms of difficulty and the types of questions asked, i.e., LOTS of anatomy and neuro.

My step one experience was just as awful as yours and the op's. I had at least 70 molecular bio questions- and no, I'm not kidding. I actually kept track of the molecular bio questions by counting them since I wanted to make sure that I wasn't being biased. My behavioral science questions were awful also- I don't want to get into specifics, but I had a question in which I only knew what the particular insurance was because my friend works at Aetna. However, I still didn't know what the hell the answer was.

Step one was by far the hardest test I have ever taken, and it was a hell of a lot harder than qbank or either of the nbme assessments. The material I was tested on was terribly skewed- lots and lots of molecular bio, very few biochem questions, a decent amount of anatomy ('regular' anatomy and neuro), and literally 15 pharm questions (and these weren't easy either since they mostly were based off of graphs with about 15 squiggly lines on them). The questions were f'n long- the vast majority of them were at least a paragraph and reading only the stem would not have been the least bit helpful since the whole question seemed to be important.

I was terribly upset when I finished this test last Friday. Now, I'm too tired to care since I'm in my second day of surgery. Hopefully I won't have to retake step one .

 

[cardioboy]

My step one experience was just as awful as yours and the op's. I had at least 70 molecular bio questions- and no, I'm not kidding. I actually kept track of the molecular bio questions by counting them since I wanted to make sure that I wasn't being biased. My behavioral science questions were awful also- I don't want to get into specifics, but I had a question in which I only knew what the particular insurance was because my friend works at Aetna. However, I still didn't know what the hell the answer was.

Step one was by far the hardest test I have ever taken, and it was a hell of a lot harder than qbank or either of the nbme assessments. The material I was tested on was terribly skewed- lots and lots of molecular bio, very few biochem questions, a decent amount of anatomy ('regular' anatomy and neuro), and literally 15 pharm questions (and these weren't easy either since they mostly were based off of graphs with about 15 squiggly lines on them). The questions were f'n long- the vast majority of them were at least a paragraph and reading only the stem would not have been the least bit helpful since the whole question seemed to be important.

I was terribly upset when I finished this test last Friday. Now, I'm too tired to care since I'm in my second day of surgery. Hopefully I won't have to retake step one .

i am beginning to think that those of that took this exam in the months of july and august have the same awful experience, is the test getting increasingly harder

 

[carrigallen]

Based on the experiences of posters here, it sounds like the Step I exam has become a bit more molecular biology-based this year. Fewer of the classical photographs and buzzwords, and slightly more detail-oriented in molecular biology?

 

[Back34]

Bump...anyone of us "oh f--- I failed" - type people hear anything yet?

 

[MedicinePowder]

just to concur: step 1 questions (at least on my version) were significantly longer, more invovled, and more ambiguous than practice questions i worked through in my preparation. i did qbank, nms question book, nbme assessments etc. there's always the "anxiety" factor that may skew your interpretation of the actual test, but i'm worked so many questions that i feel my interpretation of the actual test if very accurate. again, different people report differently, don't know if others simply getting leaner versions or not.

 

[Back34]

Bump...anyone of us "oh f--- I failed" - type people hear anything yet?

Anything??

 

[daisygirl]

Anything??

Not yet. I took the exam two weeks ago, so I don't expect to hear anything for at least another two weeks.

I haven't thought much about step one since I'm a bit sleep deprived from my surgery clerkship. I'm a bit nervous though- I had never lost 'my cool' during an exam throughout my two years of med school, however, I did let my anxiety get the best of me while taking step one. There is nothing that I can do at this point though. I can only hope for the best 😳 .

 

[Back34]

Not yet. I took the exam two weeks ago, so I don't expect to hear anything for at least another two weeks.

I haven't thought much about step one since I'm a bit sleep deprived from my surgery clerkship. I'm a bit nervous though- I had never lost 'my cool' during an exam throughout my two years of med school, however, I did let my anxiety get the best of me while taking step one. There is nothing that I can do at this point though. I can only hope for the best 😳 .

Best of luck then. I get the big email on Wednesday, which will be duly followed with a fine ale, either in celebration or disgust.

 

[daisygirl]

Best of luck then. I get the big email on Wednesday, which will be duly followed with a fine ale, either in celebration or disgust.

Good luck to you also . I'll be doing exactly what you posted in two weeks. 🙂

 

[Back34]

Nice to hear I'm not the only one who walked away from Step I with a big load of sh#$ in my pants. I did half of the qbank questions and averaged about 64% when all was said and done. Moved on to both self - assessment exams and hit average on both of them. I could care less about derm, ophtho, and what have you, so average suited me just fine.

In retrospect, the only thing I had going for me was complete relaxation going into the exam. Like the OP, about a quarter of the questions were gimmies, half I could narrow down to 2 or 3 choices and make my most educated guess, and a quarter were the WTF type questions. I left feeling pretty beaten up and was sure I didn't even get half of the damn things right. I still haven't gotten my scores, but feel a little more confident that I'm not alone in my sentiment.

Thus, for me, Step I was MUCH more difficult than either qbank or the self - assessment exams, in terms of difficulty and the types of questions asked, i.e., LOTS of anatomy and neuro.

Frankly, I'm FUC---- SPEECHLESS!!! I have no idea how it happened, but I wound up with a 224!! Thanks to all the great people giving great advice on the board. I was positive x 20 I failed that damn thing. Anyway, good luck to all in whatever endeavor you may find yourself. I'm officially a 3RD FUC---- year student 😎 😎 😎 😎

 

[daisygirl]

I received my score two days ago- 226. I have no f'n clue how I did it since I honestly felt that I failed that horrible exam. I'm elated beyond words. As soon as I finished up my hellish surgery clerkship, I'm going to celebrate with lots of booze and good food 😀

 

[scootad.]

congrats daisy! you deserve it! arent you glad you delayed? you have many doors open to you now.

 

[lattimer13]

congrats daisy. 👍