Hey guys:
So I took the test on Monday. I'm a DO and took COMLEX back in September and wasn't going to take the USMLE until I got a good score on Path, Pharm and behaviour (crappy score on OMM 🙁) So I took a couple practice tests end of December and got 200 on one NBME and 193 on the other. So I was like ****, I suck at this, time to stop. But I promised myself (and the sig other) I would do one NBME in a test setting (previous two were in bedroom, the 193 was laying in bed). Additionally, I went over the old ones and decided I'm just going to go with the most common answer choice instead of trying to pysch myself into thinking it's not right. I took NBME 15, I think, and got a 219 and 221 on NBME 12? (490 and 500 on the score system). I also got a 221 and 224 on USMLE world. Unforunetly, I dropped a couple points on last the two NBMEs I took that were sandwiched around the 224 Uworld.
So the exam wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I was really nervous the last few days--esp since my scores dropped a bit, but decided to go ahead and take the exam since I had put the last 4-5 weeks studying pretty seriously for the exam, plus a couple hours a day before that while on rotations. I think one reason it wasn't as bad was because I'm a really fast test taker, always have been, so I wasn't crunched for time and generally finished with 8-12 minutes per section. I did skip over 3-4 questions I was getting stuck on and came back to them. Better to do this then waste 15 minutes on them.
What really helped settle my nerves was that 3 of the first 7-10 questions were covered by Pholston in his amazing powerpoints. Two of the q I might have gotten anyway, but no way was I going to get one on metastastic cancer unless I had read his PPTs the nights before. I also got one question straight from pathoma earlier. Dr. Sattar said, they're not going to list X as an answer choice, because everyone knows that. Instead, they're going to list Y." Well, Y was an an answer choice and honestly, I wouldn't have known that because that bug was in maybe 2-3 questions on Uworld.
I got killed on the neuro. Lot of cross sections and that was my weakness. Cross sections for anatomy too and I'm not sure they went much better, but only I knew a few of those. Rest of anatomy wasn't so bad. I thought the biochem, micro, immuno, pharm and behavioural wasn't that bad--very doable and fair. The comlex micro was probably harder than the Step 1 micro, but everything else was harder on USMLE.
In terms of questions, I thought they were about the same style and difficulty as the NBMEs--same length too for the most part. I thought all the questions were going to be 2-3 paragraphs each, but luckily they weren't. Maybe 20-25% were longer and those are the ones that screw people over, I think. Gotta skip them and come back to them rather than wasting time. Hopefully being a fast test taker will help me as other people may struggle and that'll drop their points some in comparison to mine (yeah, sucky way to think about it, but this is graded in relationship to how others have done in the past). I actually had the same question three times on the exam. Not identical, but they were looking for the same immuno deficiency and just asked it different ways. One of my professors had mentioned this and I got a practice question on it 2 weeks ago, so I think I knew it. I was surprised by this, but one of the NBMEs has the same micro q 3x as well. Different question, though--although that question was on my exam too. One of the graphs from the NBMEs was also on the real deal. The graph was changed and wasn't the same shape, but x and y axises were the same as was the subject. The USMLE alog probably has tons of different pods and probably picks a question (or more) from each pod to balance out the difficulty, so I could see this happened. Hopefully it was the same question they were asking and not me imagining it!
As for scoring, hopefully I'll do well. So I know there has been a lot of controvery on scoring and what percentage you need right, etc. So my professor who teaches for Kaplan said you generally need a 74% to get a 240. Obvioulsy I wasn't in that category on the practice exams, in fact, I was getting a little higher than that on the NBMEs--not great but decent. But he put it down as, if you KNOW 1/3 of the questions and can narrow the other 2/3 down to 2 and get half right, you're at 67%. You'll need to hit a few more right, but if you know you're stuff, you can--it is a doable exam.
One thing I was surprised about was how much basic physio there was on it. There's a lot on the NBMEs and maybe even more on the exam. If you know the concept, the questions are easy. If you don't, then youre screwed. I got screwed on one that I knew because they asked it in a weird way. Same thing for a anti-viral drug I knew well. I've seen the videos for how it works, but it got me. I thought every answer choice was going to be asked in a weird way, but I think 50-60% of the answer choices were pretty straight forward (like in the NBMEs) and maybe 15-20% were were asked in a totally oddball way with the rest somewhere in between.
here's to a couple tough weeks waiting for my score!
