Hi Guys,
I used this website a lot so decided that I should wrote down my experience. I got my result today 261, I took my exam on Dec 15th, 2015.
Resources that I used,
-Kaplan Lecture Notes except Pathology. I read them once while watching the videos early my prep. I found it ok, not extremely useful but recommend it to generate a background knowledge. Definitely suggest supplementing Gross Anatomy ( only this) with somewhere else cause I believe their gross anatomy was pretty insufficient.
-I read Goljan RR again early my prep, at first I thought that it was a good book to read but then I realized that it is very low yield and you don't retain much of the info after all. I didn't solve a single question thanks to it, plus in my belief harder questions are not coming from obscure pathologies but more from atypical presentations in the real exam so I don't recommend this book. I think this book was one of the mistakes that I made while I was preparing the exam. I read 4-5 chapters from Pathoma at my late preperation, I liked it and find it very useful and regret once more that I read Goljan instead of this. It would have been much faster and I would have retained much more info than I did with Goljan.
-After finishing above mentioned resources I go through First Aid once and then did Kaplan QBank. I recommend Kaplan QBank if you have time to do it. It is obviously not a UWorld but gives you a solid background. I finished Kaplan QBank around July. I read every single explanation. I was %82 correct, random, timed mode. Especially their biostatistics questions are nice. I highly recommend annotating from QBank to First Aid.
-After finishing Kaplan QBank went through First Aid one more time and then took my first NBME 17( again one more mistake, I should have spared this last but you never realize when are you going to take the exam.) I got 266 in NBME.
-After this I made my biggest mistake and started USMLE-Rx, thinking that It will give me more disease presentation and help solidify my First Aid background( I thought it is better to do a QBank rather than plainly reading but I was extremely wrong). Also, I read that more question simply translate to better score ( which is quite wrong as well). I think people who are aiming for 260+ should skip this QBank as this is very badly structured QBank. I could have learned much more by just reading First Aid, as the information that I didn't memorized was not tested in Qbank but it was written on First Aid ( I could have reversed 4 easy mistakes just by reading First Aid). It took me around 2 month to finish this, as I start working again. At first I was reading the explanations, but then I decided to skip them as questions were pretty easy and explanations were not that great. Overall around %90, random, first-timed. Overall I DO NOT recommend this Qbank for high aimers.
-After this I took my second NBME, NBME 15. I scored 262 on this, and again realized that how bad a decision was to do USMLE-Rx as my points dropped.
-Later I started doing UWorld. I don't think I have to write about how great UWorld is as It has been written in many threads thousand times. It is absolutely the best thing to do, and a definite must for Step 1 exam. I started around %87 correct (97 percentile) and finished at %89 (98 percentile). At midway, I realized that I reached the plateau and can't get any further and decided to schedule my exam. Before doing so at midway I took NBME 16, which I got 264. Thinking that I was doing fine, I scheduled my exam at mid-december. Finished UWorld 3 weeks before my exam and go through First Aid last time for 2 weeks.
- I dedicated my last week for only self-assesment test to increase my stamina. I started by doing UWSA-1, which I scored > 265( %92 correct), next day I did UWSA-2, again > 265(%89 correct). My last weekend, I tried to simulate the real exam length by combining 2 NBMEs and 1NBME plus free 132. Last weekend saturday, I did NBME 11 ( 269) and NBME12(266). Last Sunday, I did NBME 13(266) and free 132( %92 correct).
-Last night I did go over the last pages of First Aid and somethings that I had hard time to remember( developmental milestones for example) and slept around 12.00 without any problem. I woke up briefly around 5.30 but go back to sleep and woke up again around 8 a.m. I take a shower and go to exam center around 30 minutes early.
-Exam experience: I didn't have any wtf? questions, as all my hard questions could be solved by educated guess but apparently I didn't make the good calls in the exam. Ethics questions was definitely hard and I had a good amount of them. I had some hard time in diagnosing diseases in a couple of questions which was an issue that has never happened me before in any other self assesment test. After the test I realized that I had bunch of stupid mistakes around 5 that was very simple and there was 10 questions that I think I was wrong %80 which adds up to 15 by the time I finished checking the questions that I recalled. At that moment I knew that I was kind of screwed and might not be able to reach my NBME average. I freaked out and went through SDN threads to read nearly every step 1 experience of last 4 years to find cases like me. Today, I got the results, as Phloston said in his experience sheet, I felt exactly the same I think the exam was a draw for me as I was expecting to break 265, but I ended up below my NBME averages.
Note regarding score release, if you took the exam starting from 7th December till 21st December, your results will be anounced at 4th or 5th Wednesday(1 week later than usual), unlike 3rd or 4th Wednesday that everyone talks about. That's because they don't release scores the week after Christmas, but this doesn't affect the scores that are released only for that week, it delays all other scores as well.
For those guys who are interested in numbers, I summed up my NBME/UWSA scores and QBank percentiles;
-Kaplan QBank (%82) random, first time ( 5 months before)
-Usmle-Rx(%90) random,first time( 3 months before) --> DO NOT DO THIS Q BANK
-UWorld (%89, 98th percentile) random, first time
-NBME17 -- 266 ( 4months prior)
-NBME15-- 262 ( 1.5 month prior)
-NBME16 -- 264 (1 month prior)
-NBME11 -- 269 ( 3 days prior) -- very easy and straight forward questions unlike real exam so I don't recommend doing any NBMEs before NBME12
-NBME12- 266(offline, 3 days prior)
-NBME13 - 266(2 day prior)
-UWSA1- 265+ (%92 correct, 5 day prior)
-UWSA2- 265+ (%89 correct, 4 day prior)
-Free 132- %92 ( 2 day prior)
