MD & DO NBME and class ranking plateau

[FishermanDon99]

---

Members do not see this ad.

NBME makes up the majority of our end of the unit exams at my school and I was wondering how well early pre-clinical exam performance correlates with performance on Step 1. I recently received unit scores and was happy with my results but I can't help but feel that my peers are still doing much better than I am. I scored in the high 80s but I am certain there are many people in my year who did much better than I did as my advisor said the median score was about an 82. Also, I felt that I had studied much harder and efficiently than I had the previous unit but still performed about the same. Is there a way to improve my scores? I am mostly concerned about Step because year 1+2 are P/F, and if I am barely beating the median score at my school then how can I compete with the rest of the nation including people at Ivy leagues, etc. I mostly used Zanki, first aid, BnB and Pathoma to study content and Rx for questions, and was planning on continuing to do so for long-term studying. Any wisdom or advice is greatly appreciated.

 

[Type2Fiber]

High 80s is a decent score. Someone correct me if this is wrong, but I think the school still selects the NBME questions for your exams. So if you want to break into the mid/upper 90s you'll need to master material the professors want you to know in addition to the board review stuff.

The modules that I made to sure review all school stuff is when I broke into the mid 90s and 2 std deviations above the median. Was in the 90-92% correct with zanki, ect. only

Which all makes sense, because if you wanna be near the top, you gotta know pretty much everything well

 

[FishermanDon99]

High 80s is a decent score. Someone correct me if this is wrong, but I think the school still selects the NBME questions for your exams. So if you want to break into the mid/upper 90s you'll need to master material the professors want you to know in addition to the board review stuff.

The modules that I made to sure review all school stuff is when I broke into the mid 90s and 2 std deviations above the median. Was in the 90-92% correct with zanki, ect. only

Which all makes sense, because if you wanna be near the top, you gotta know pretty much everything well

Thanks for the tips, it makes sense that what is stressed in lecture will be high yield for unit exams. Have you taken step yet, and if so do you think or know if your score correlated with how you and your peers did in terms of unit performance?

 

[Type2Fiber]

Haven't taken step yet, but I know NBME unit performance is the most correlated with step score of all the metrics at my school. If you're doing well on NBMEs and incorporating some method of spaced repetition, you're doing everything you need to be doing