My UMSLE experience:
6 months total prep, 1 month dedicated
Materials:
FA 6 passes over 6 months
pathoma
RR blue boxes and margins
Med essentials HY
micro cards
lange pharm cards
BRS biochem cards
Questions:
kaplan qbank 68% (canceled a lot of tests before realizing you couldn't reset it)
usmlerx 75%
uworld 70% first pass, 87% second pass
nbme 15 259 (2 weeks out)
nbme 16 249 (1 week out)
Free 150 92%
Schedule:
For the first 5 months I still had a lot of course work to do, so I prepped for my board exams (I am a DO candidate) during the week and studied for school on the weekends. This was sufficient since my school is pass/fail and prior to this study period I would score within the top 10-20% on most exams, thus I basically slid by for the last 5 months. Treated this exam like a 35 hour/week job during the school year, and maybe 50 hours during dedicated.
For my entire education, I have been a minimalist and I try and maximize what I know from minimal sources. Further, I get little from reading text and need to be actively engaged, and thus my study prep worked well for me. I tried reading some kaplan lecture notes and CMMRS but I got bored and lost focus very quickly. If you are an average student, even at a DO school, I strongly think you only need FA/pathoma/uworld. I tried using DIT, and I did it for a while, mostly at night (I am a morning person) so that I could have something to do to extend my study hours per day, and tried to learn passively. It seems like my classmates have mixed feelings about DIT, where some loved it, and some like me liked 1/4th of it. To understand something, I like to know why, and out of the several instructors at DIT or whatever, only 1 or 2 go into the why, whereas the others just read from the teleprompter. Different strokes for different folks. All of the supplemental crap, DIT, firecracker, etc, you need to try it before you buy it. DIT came to my school and hyped it up, and probably got a ton of sales from prying on many naive, worried, students. Try before you buy!
Further, I am a anal-retentive planner. If I don't have a set schedule every single day, my head explodes. So early November I set a day by day schedule of what I hoped to accomplish, using my weekends as buffers. The schedule was set in Thanksgiving, but changed weekly as I realized what was realistic and not. This was advantageous for me because I knew I would only study at most 8 hours a day (even during dedicated time), and I could have a normal life outside of studying (ie played xbox daily, worked out 30-50 mins/day, and/or watched all of the office and the good wife)
Months 1-2 I read FA (20-30 pages/day), listened to all pathoma (1 chapter/day) and annotated his words into text, read 30 notecards/day (shuffled all my cards into one giant deck), finished kaplan qbank (92 questions/day).
Months 3-4 I continued to read FA (20-30 pages/day), read 1 chapter of pathoma a day, read 30 notecards/day, finished usmlerx (92 questions/day), partially read Medessentials and add some stuff that wasn't in FA
Month 5: FA (40-50 pages/day), Uworld tutor mode & untimed (2-3 blocks/day), 40 notecards/day
Month 6: FA (50 pages/day), uworld timed and random (4 blocks/day only studied incorrects), reread pathoma 1 week before test, completed 1-2 nbmes/week, uworld assessment exam
Week before exam: 1 final pass of FA (100 pages/day), RR path (focusing on images and big picture), Med essentials appendix (its like FA's rapid review section, but more detailed, includes images)
Day before exam: Looked at all pharm and micro in FA and took most of the day off
My exam experience
I over studied for this crappy exam. It is pretty unfortunate that I was scoring pretty solid on my uworld and NBMEs and left thinking I frankly have no idea if I did well or not. During NBME's I would mark 10 questions per block, on my Step 1 exam I marked 8-12 questions on 6 blocks and about 20 questions on another block. I think this was out of fear, but there were easily 5 questions per block that were not at all in FA (FA, pathology, micro). Kind of scary that my future depends on this test, given that there was a lot of touchy-feel-ethics and epidemiology. The exam was just like uworld in format except for the media questions, which were more in depth, clearer images, and frankly pretty obvious.
I think FA + uworld gave me a solid foundation to answer 70% of the questions from buzzwords and pattern recognition. The other 10% were a crap shoot and were neither in FA nor were they covered in my first 2 years. The other 20% was minuscule detail that was not something that one could prepare for. I think this type of material stems from your schools education, and if you have a good foundation from years 1 & 2 you will do well reasoning these questions out, and if not, studying 10 different books a few months before your exam won't help (just my opinion). There are too many topics that this exam can test you on, that if you don't have a solid foundation, there is a potential to struggle. The exam must be completely randomized from a giant qbank because I had 2 sets of questions that were almost identical, and completely different experience than what some of our fellow sdn'ers have commented on.
In hind sight I would have taken the exam a month earlier or started a month later. Six months prep is too much for the average US graduate, I think. Further, I would have saved money by not buying usmlerx or kaplan. I felt that while these sources give you a lot more detail, they don't build the foundation you need to do well; Uworld does this sufficiently. RX was more worthwhile than kaplan since kaplan is very detail orientated, and I felt my exam was more big picture orientated. 2 weeks ago I would have said, I will study anything to get a higher score, but after taking the exam I can not confidently say that the extra qbanks really helped. Lastly, Med Essentials is not really talked about on these forums but it has a lot information which was not in FA. I ended up putting around 25 pages of notes from ME into FA (brainstem stuff, physio, anatomy, etc), and I was glad that I did. Further micro and biochem are not taught sufficiently at my school, and I felt that BRS biochem cards, FA biochem, and FA micro was sufficient.
On to comlex, but I figured I took away so much from previous students' experiences that I would further contribute.
TLDR: 3-4 months is plenty of study time, FA + uworld + pathoma + a few nbmes is sufficient for materials, supplement with RR path and med essentials for pictures and a few topics not covered in FA
