NBME "Shelf" Preparation

[seminoma]

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The day before christmas break we have a "shelf" exam that our school uses to evaluate how well we have learned things to this point (includes all of MS1 plus the organ systems we've covered so far). It's a 6 hour exam made from NBME questions. We have 4 study days to prepare.

This is the first year our school is doing this (i.e. I can't ask the MS3s or MS4s for advice). Do any of you go to a school that does this type of thing? What have you heard from older students to do? And what do you plan to do to prepare?

I'm planning to review some of the higher yield anatomy topics like brachial plexus and branchial arches, micro/immuno, and a few other things that I know I'm weak on. Other than that I'm just going to do Kaplan qbank and USMLE-Rx on random. We do get a score report so I would like to take this as seriously as possible in order to evaluate what I'm weak on. What do you think?

 

[WildEMDoc]

We have NBME exams after every block, so I can tell you what I've done for all of them.

Mostly its just FA and QBank questions, and review pathoma (which I had done throughout the block). Obviously since yours if for all of the blocks, you might not have enough time to all of them. I would focus on QBank questions and review things you get wrong in FA.

 

[IMdoc2015]

we had a similar exam; a 4 hour practice NBME about 5 months before I took step 1. We got a score report with a subject histogram like you described but it didnt affect our preclinical grade. Because of that I didn't study for it at all because I figured if the point was to evaluate your strengths / weaknesses, then cramming for a few days beforehand would skew the data.