I'm an average med student who did well on Step 1.
Don't let people's ideas of what means what get you freaked out. I jumped 45 points in 5 weeks (with two big plateaus, including right before my test) so anything is possible. I used the qbanks to learn, including reading through Uworld right before my test. If I had paid attention to what people on here say about your Uworld average, I would have expected a score of about 25 points lower 🙂. The key for me was ditching something if I wasn't learning from it. Like random Uworld tests--systems based was better for me.
The things that helped me get over my plateaus:
1) Reading through First Aid over 10 days. I wrote down what I didn't know, tried to go slowly. Watched Pathoma for pathology during this-->30 point jump in the first 10 days of dedicated study.
2) Watched pathoma twice during my dedicated study (did not use it for pathology class at all but I did very well in my course by focusing on the lecture material, made pathoma easier).
3) In the last ten days before my test I spent 3 days watching pathoma, 3 days reading first aid again and 2 days re-reading as much of Uworld as I could stand (my previous tests, in systems based blocks). Wrote down stuff I didn't really know, but didn't really review it because I was so sick of it by the end. Chilled as much as possible the last 2 days. I figured before school exams I try to look over everything once close to my exam so I did it for this too, it just took 10 days 🙂. The last ten days produced a 15 point jump from my last practice test to my actual score. Unlike people who did very well despite insisting they failed for 4 weeks until we got our scores, I knew I had done pretty darn well on this test. And it was because of how much more confidence I had after my 10 day cram session--I was able to work through buzzword questions so quickly, and had time for reasoning.
Good luck! Work hard and have confidence.
