Not enough time to do questions!!

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Macguy86

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I am freaking out. Its been about 5 weeks of full studying and i am on my second round of going through the material. It takes me a long time to get through the sections. It took me 2 days just to
1. Read through HY Behavioral
2. Read FA Behavioral Science/Psychology

and this is without memorizing it! Now this was my first time actually going through these materials, but I am so damn slow. I was suppose to be doing 50Q a day with UWorld but that is not happening.

I start DIT at next week and need some advice ASAP. I only got a 203 on my 1st NBME 4 weeks into studying. This week I am covering things I did not cover yet (Pharm, Behavioral, Psych) and will be going through Anatomy/Musc and stuff I had trouble with.

What am I doing wrong? I have 4 weeks to study exactly. Including DIT. I realize I am slow/really stupid.

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I just wanted to chime in to say that I'm slow as hell too, man. You're not alone. I've had Kaplan QBank for over two months and I've only gotten through 39% of it. And most of the time it'll just be in spurts of lots of questions, followed by days and days (and maybe weeks) of neglecting questions.

I'm trying the whole Taus thing, and it's definitely slow going at times . . . and like you said, that's before you've really begun to straight "memorize" stuff.
 
I would consider cutting out low-yield materials. Work First Aid hard and try to get it memorized since you have 4 weeks. Listen to Goljan's lectures, but since you're so slow I would not recommend trying to cram in RR Path, so you'll have to do with his audio (which is fine anyway). Then do questions. At least 50 a day, try 100. I wouldn't do anything else besides that to be honest, unless you have a glaring weakness and need a brief supplement (like reading a chapter in BRS Phys).
 
I think 2 days to cover all of Behavioral + Psych is pretty good. That's not "fast" but its certainly not slow. I'm sure you are learning more than you think, which some argue is more important than memorization for this exam.

4 weeks is still plenty of time to boost your score. I would recommend spending about 2 days per organ system reading FA + BRS Physio + either RR or BRS Path and/or Goljan lectures. Then end the day with about 50 questions (75-100 as time progresses). You should be able to get through all of that in 2-3 weeks and then that leaves you a week to "memorize" First Aid and do tons of questions

like the above poster said, cut out some of the low yield stuff
 
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The most important thing you can do at this point is stop freaking out. Get your act together. Being nervous and stressed will make your studying suck, so get a grip however you need to. Cut out the low-yield stuff - that means ditching everything but Goljan audio, FA, and maybe BRS phys and the margin notes of RR path - and get to work. Whatever you do, don't give up on questions. They're really important for actually learning stuff. Without a bit of active learning, you're just looking at words all day long.
 
My advice: make UWorld the priority. Do the questions before you start studying, rather than the other way around.

Also I just got the same 203 after the same 4 weeks of studying an was really happy. It helps to have failed a few practice tests earlier on, really changes your perspective.
 
thanks. i have already read RR, BRS phys, HY Neuro, Parts of HY Embryo, and HY Behavioral Science and annotated into FA. This was in 4 weeks time.

I start DIT in 7 days. I plan to get through as much as FA/UWorld Questions take a practice NBME and UW SA 1 within 7 days. I really hope getting DIT was worth it, i am doing well on UWorld so far averaging between 70-80% correct but I have only done ~200questions. So I will stick to getting through the systems portion of FA this week and then take a practice exam.

Any advice for the practice exams? Im not sure why I score high on practice questions, but BOMBED the NBME. If i take another 2 practice test, spend $100 to get another ~200 I will go nutz!!
 
thanks. i have already read RR, BRS phys, HY Neuro, Parts of HY Embryo, and HY Behavioral Science and annotated into FA. This was in 4 weeks time.

I start DIT in 7 days. I plan to get through as much as FA/UWorld Questions take a practice NBME and UW SA 1 within 7 days. I really hope getting DIT was worth it, i am doing well on UWorld so far averaging between 70-80% correct but I have only done ~200questions. So I will stick to getting through the systems portion of FA this week and then take a practice exam.

Any advice for the practice exams? Im not sure why I score high on practice questions, but BOMBED the NBME. If i take another 2 practice test, spend $100 to get another ~200 I will go nutz!!

maybe you are overthinking them
 
thanks. i have already read RR, BRS phys, HY Neuro, Parts of HY Embryo, and HY Behavioral Science and annotated into FA. This was in 4 weeks time.

I start DIT in 7 days. I plan to get through as much as FA/UWorld Questions take a practice NBME and UW SA 1 within 7 days. I really hope getting DIT was worth it, i am doing well on UWorld so far averaging between 70-80% correct but I have only done ~200questions. So I will stick to getting through the systems portion of FA this week and then take a practice exam.

Any advice for the practice exams? Im not sure why I score high on practice questions, but BOMBED the NBME. If i take another 2 practice test, spend $100 to get another ~200 I will go nutz!!

Chillax dude! Many ppl lose their mind in this whole process, make sure you have yours intact and you come outtta the experience unscathed.Just do yr best and leave out the rest.

My UW scores suck and what scares me is that Im almost half way thru,,so I changed my plans this week, its all about cramming FA with Rx as memorization tool, I feel this is helping me and Im taking the NBME 6 saturday, lets's see how it goes.

The best thing you could ever do is remedy yr glaring weaknesses,,memorize em hard and FA! Goljan audio is gr8 to seal it all off.

Do that and take an NBME, but please have faith in yrself,,Im pretty much a slow-mo reader too, we are all med students, it takes some resilience to get here in the first place ,,,and you did :)
 
Figure out how you learn best and make that a priority.
I learn so much more for doing questions than from reading.
For me, I read the material pretty fast and do a lot of questions.
The key is really reviewing everything in the question and learning all the relative info, not just the correct answer.

I was spending a ton of time just reading and it really wasn't working.
Things seem to be going a lot better now.
I take another practice exam this week, so we'll see if it really worked...
 
It's indeed a tough balance between questions and reading (and in that regard, then deciding what book(s) to focus on).

For some subjects, a trip through First Aide is enough to really help refresh most of the salient points on a subject. For others, I realize I never really was taught the underlying pathology/pathophys of a certain disease state or process, and in that case First Aid might as well be written in Spanish because it's just a list of seemingly disconnected symptoms unless you know the etiology.

I've definitely begun to appreciate which subjects were taught very well at my school, and which ones were taught horribly. When I go through Cardio and Pulm, I realize I was fortunate in how it was taught here. But going through things like Cancer/Cell Injury, I realize our school sucks at that.

I've found numerous times where I'll get a question and realize it really is straight out of FA, except that I can't recall which disorder had that constellation of symptoms, or I know the disorder but can't remember the obscure 5th symptom that was listed (after the question stem gives you the first 4).


All this is really just to say "I understand the frustration", but it's a good idea to be evaluating your strengths and weaknesses as you go. Probably one of the best pieces of advice I received for this process was, you don't stand to gain a whole lot from strengthening your strengths, but can really gain a lot by making a weakness a strength (or at least bringing it up to par with the rest of the subjects).
 
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