I was label "at risk" for failing for several reasons. My grade in micro/biochemistry was low, I took a year off between first and second year, and I scored a 349 on COMSAE D. I had to meet with advisors who told me not to watch all of the DIT videos and instead do 50 questions from one subject in the morning, study what I got wrong and watch the corresponding video if I didn't understand what I was reading in First Aid/Savarese, then do another 50 questions that afternoon. At 100 questions/day I went through COMBANK pretty quickly and also had to buy COMQUEST. I felt that COMQUEST questions were easier than COMBANK, but that could be because I only used COMQUEST near the end of my studying.
COMSAE D: 8 weeks out: 349
COMSAE A: 2.5 weeks out: 398
COMSAE B: 8 days out: 405
COMLEX: 453
The biggest difference from the question banks and the real exam is how short the question stems are. On the real deal I had a ton of questions, mostly micro, where you get basically a sentence about the patient, age, gender, race, and then one fact about the presenting disease, like a buzz word or a specific growth media, just like Fay8 said. Not surprisingly, Micro was my worst subject.If you really want to do well, and I mean really well, I would suggest that you memorize those Micro pages and every little detail about each bug.
Each subject breakdown was as I expected except Pharm which I scored surprisingly high in. Guess it was my lucky day. I ended up doing 68% of the DIT videos and pretty much all of them were on-par with what was high-yield on the exam. I suspect that the video questions are test questions for now as I hear that those are new this year. I only had one.
Given that I was considered at risk for failing, I'm pleased with my score.
