Hey guys, took the exam today. First of all, I want to give a heartfelt thanks to the people who posted words of reassurance yesterday! They really did help have a calming effect on me. Thank you for that! 🙂
On my exam, I honestly felt like a lot of the stuff wasn't explicitly found in FA (at least, not the sections that I read). A significant portion of it required reasoning your way through the question and figuring out what the answer is -- I thought the difficulty was somewhere between an NBME and UWorld questions. I'll echo what people have said: the question stems are longer and you're given lab values more often on the real deal. That definitely slows you down when you have to go back and check your answer. You do fall into a rhythm fairly quickly though -- I was terrified before starting, but as the questions started rolling by and I realized that they're pretty similar to the practice questions I did, I calmed down and tackled it just like another practice NBME/UWorld block.
Content-wise:
Path/pathophys -- pretty broad coverage. It didn't seem like a particular system was emphasized. It was perhaps slightly skewed toward endocrine/reproductive, but for the most part, I felt like it was pretty comprehensive. Some of the questions were "gimme" questions; others, you really had to reason your way through and just hope you got to the right answer. I thought Pathoma was absolutely crucial for this section -- I only read a few chapters of it during dedicated study time, but I did it religiously during the school year (went over each chapter several times while learning the system during M2 year). If you have time before your exam, I would definitely recommend reading through Pathoma again -- I would argue it's one of the best things you can do to prep yourself to answering pathology questions.
Physio -- lots of arrow questions. These were actually a bit tougher than I thought they would be, but were doable for the most part. Time consuming though because there were so many answer choices to pick through and rule out/rule in. I don't remember there being any calculations I had to worry about.
Biochem -- not as much as I expected, thankfully. Most were straight up disease stuff with occasional insulin/glucagon regulation stuff. Nothing like the detailed pathway questions that UWorld asked. A decent number of genetics questions actually, regarding inheritance patterns, pedigrees, etc. Know what disease are AD vs. X-linked vs. AR vs. mitochondrial, etc.
Neuro -- not as much neuro as I thought there would be. Covered the usual stuff regarding stroke territories, degenerative diseases, etc. Couple of CT images that may look difficult at first but, if you flip through HY neuro or any other neuro atlas the night before and know what structures different pathologies affected, they were very doable. Not too much brainstem stuff either, luckily. The ones that were on there were fairly straight-forward.
Pharm -- surprisingly, not that much. Mostly had to do with side-effects, with the occasional question on MOA. There weren't any weird drugs or anything and pretty much all of them were covered in FA. Know your side-effects well. A few kinetics and dynamics stuff (so know those dose-response curves and all that jazz). There were also a couple of questions that covered material not in FA, but definitely tested on in UWorld.
Behavioral sciences -- more questions on this material than I expected. Lots of questions on "what should the physician say next" and biostats calculations (most were relatively easy, but there were a few calculations regarding stuff I've never heard of and are definitely not in FA -- there was nothing I could've done to prepare for those few questions). Overall, they weren't too bad -- I thought the ethics/physician response questions were tougher than the ones in UWorld. It seemed like many of those questions had more than one response that I could see being a reasonable answer.
Pscyh -- not much. The big stuff popped up (depression, bipolar, schizo, etc) and drug side-effects were emphasized.
Anatomy/embryo -- more questions than I thought (anatomy, not too much embryo). They were also tough! I don't think most of that stuff was in FA -- there was a focus on GU and H&N anatomy, both of which are, unfortunately, weak areas for me. You have to read a review book in order to answer these questions because I don't remember the material being in FA or UWorld. With that being said, I still don't think spending extra time beyond FA and UWorld for anatomy is worth the time, unless you've pretty much done everything else and are confident in that stuff.
Overall, I felt about the same as I do after each UWorld block and every NBME I've taken -- unsure of how it went. However, things have always worked out in UWorld and NBMEs, so I hope that this feeling means that I did about the same (I'd be absolutely ecstatic if that was the case!). I had maybe 10-15 questions marked in each block (a little more than how many I marked in the NBMEs). I feel like I lost a bunch of points on the anatomy questions -- there were even some simple ones that I simply overthought and changed my answer from the right one to the wrong one. It definitely didn't feel as bad as I thought it might be, though. I'm just so glad that it's done! I can finally relax and watch TV without feeling guilty! All I can hope now for is a good score so that I don't ever have to worry about this awful exam again. These past 2-3 weeks have been absolutely hellish!
TL;DR -- Pathoma and UWorld were clutch, IMHO. FA did save my ass a few times, but I felt that UWorld and Pathoma gave you the tools to tackle the reasoning-heavy types of problems that were common on my exam. I didn't read all of FA, so take that with a grain of salt.
Cheers to 2013 
*conspiracy*
