Dude, you're literally advising someone to not study for OMM on a test where a significant portion is OMM. Maybe you received a great OMM education and only needed 5 hours of studying time, but considering how many DO schools do not focus very heavily on OMM, that's likely not the case for most students. Also, do you not realize that many questions that include OMM, even if the OMM isn't relevant to the answer, will throw students off, leading to a lower score?
There are a couple other fascinating parts of your reply that should be addressed.
1. What is the point of mentioning family, research, and other activities? If you take the COMLEX shortly after fully preparing for Step 1, how does that significantly impact the time you have for aspects of your life?
2. The data I brought up was merely to point out that OMM is a significant portion of the exam, to the point where mastering it can even boost one's score above those who much better in other key sections, particularly pathology. That doesn't mean anyone should neglect other topics (not sure how many times I have to repeat this). If OP studies hard for ALL aspects of the exam, they can maximize their chances of earning a respectable score. This is an exam where the higher your score, the higher the benefit. Thus, it makes absolutely zero sense to automatically reduce your maximum potential by ignoring key topics that the exam will cover.
3. You're literally advocating for "educated guesses" over actually learning the material. lmao What on earth??? I can understand having to do that if you simply cannot summon the time to study some low-yield material, but this is 20% (according to your own experience) of the exam! More importantly, this is relatively easy material to study for, which has a high gain vs. effort ratio.
I can understand not liking OMM, I'm not the biggest fan of it either, but one's preferences should be put aside for maximizing one's score on this incredibly important exam.
If you actually read the post and context I think you will understand what I'm saying including the explanation as to why. You have poor insight into the exam so you can't really offer criticisms of an argument that you don't grasp as evidenced by your second post.
First, I didn't say not to study it at all. I said not to study OMM aside from for OP's in-house OMM exams and a little bit in between usmle and comlex if they want. I said that one doesn't actually need to do so if they really didn't want to though. Then I went on to explain why I said both of those things. I'm not going to repeat them here.
As for the bolded, to be polite as possible, you have no idea what you are talking about here and the fact that you said the above illustrates that clearly. Do you know how many of us joke about subconsciously ignoring the OMM findings in questions on boards and comats? As I said previously, you will understand this eventually. It's a non-issue.
1. Opportunity cost. OP phrased it like they were going to study OMM before that gap between the two exams. It has drawbacks that need to be considered. OP should also be cautious not to fall prey to their school scaring them into studying OMM too much at the expense of other studies. This was clear in the previous post.
2. Every time you are studying OMM you are not studying other sciences. This is only changed by adding more study time to also study OMM on top of your real studies. This takes time from family. This isn't debatable unless you want to turn this into a metaphysical debate on what existence and time are. I'm not really interested in that.
Furthermore, you keep saying things about Comlex that lead me to believe that you think your score matters on Comlex. Essentially, it does not. Go ahead and ask us M4s how often our 600-800 comlex scores have been brought up on the trail this year (or read the 10000 threads on this topic here. WTF?!) Take USMLE and don't fail. That's best accomplished by using your fixed amount of study time on USMLE topics (that happen to prepare you adequately for comlex.) I already explained why OMM is not a key topic to the exam when actually evaluated critically.
3. Educated guesses and test taking skills are pillars of excelling on board exams and their utility isn't really up for debate. My opinion, that is debatable, is laid out in the above post that you didn't read carefully based on your response. Maybe 1 in 5/6 questions was an NBOME labeled OMM question. Then I broke down why the actual number of OMM questions is far lower when you remove the questions learned in basic sciences, gross anatomy, in-house OMM exams that are just principles that don't need studied or analyzed at all. True OMM knowledge questions probably make up less than 10% of the exam. I stated that even if one did not study these true omm knowledge topics, one is not going to miss all of them because statistically they will guess some of the right even if they literally just clicked random answers in the exam. I didn't say someone should guess on all the OMM questions (although you definitely could and still pass comfortably.) I'm saying that when someone says don't bother with OMM they aren't actually blowing off 20% of the exam. It's more like less than 10% and they aren't guaranteed to miss all 10% due to guessing correctly on some if nothing else.
The time you study trying to increase your comlex could be used to increase your step knowledge (would be good for step 1 but now useful for wards and step 2 foundation.) The utility of increasing your comlex score is TINY compared to the utility of increasing usmle knowledge. You will see this eventually.
Like I said, you are halfway into M1. You will understand sooner than later. It's fine.
