Hey all, long time lurker here. Took Step 1 back in March and got my score a few weeks ago. Followed along with a bunch of the amazingly helpful and thoughtful advice posted here over time and wanted to share my experience:
About me: I was a VERY average MD school applicant, probably secondary to being a bit lazy and have a bit too much fun. Solid GPA but nothing to call home about, average MCAT score. I was lucky to get into one school off of the waitlist at the end of the cycle.
I worked much harder the past two years and was a pretty solid pre-clinical student. I'm not sure where I fall within our class; we're under a P/F system and they don't really report averages or percentiles over the first two years, but most of my preclinical grades sat in the range from 89-93, whatever that might mean.
Pre-step: I did not really do much review leading up to the dedicated Step 1 study period. We had exams the two weeks before, so I was pretty focused on those, did some light review of a few subjects to prepare for some of our school-run Step review groups with older students, but didn't do much beyond that (and it showed):
School-administered NBME 17 pre-step study period = 205
Our school provides ~6 weeks to study for Step 1 + 1 week vacation (or 7 weeks). I elected to take Step 1 the week before most of my classmates, at the end of 5 weeks, knowing that I'd be more willing to move it back if I felt unprepared than move it forward if I felt I was ready. I didn't really put together a daily schedule, but planned on reviewing with DIT/FA for the first week and a half (while doing one, timed UW block each day and reviewing it completely). I chose DIT because it basically reads you FA, and I felt that it provided a nice, organized framework for completely reviewing FA in a timely manner. I watched the videos on 1.5x speed to get through them a bit quicker, which I thought was reasonable. Once that was over, I started focusing primarily on UW. I did 2-4 timed blocks per day over the next few weeks and reviewed them all that day. Key to using UW (IMO): I reviewed every question in every block completely, cross referencing with FA, took some notes, etc. It was a painfully slow process at times, w/ blocks taking 2-3 hours to review, but I felt that I really understood the material well in that way. I slowly made my way through Pathoma, often in context - if I had an endocrine heavy block, I'd watch the endocrine videos afterwards so that it would create a memory hook to some of the questions I had gone through. I would do something similar with FA, reviewing the FA section on an illness when I read through the UW explanation of a question. I often studied from 9am-10pm, with a few short breaks interspersed throughout the day, and took 24 hours off from Saturday afternoon - Sunday afternoon each week so that I'd feel like I had 2 days off, in some way. I tried to take a practice test every Friday (UWSA or NBME), my scores were as follows:
UWSA1 3 weeks out: 232
UWSA2 2 weeks out: 257
NBME17: 1 week out: 245
I also tracked my UW average throughout the study period. I started with mid-60s, and worked my way up to high-70s/low 80s pretty consistently:
Overall UW Average: 78% (all blocks were 44-questions, timed)
During the test: When I first opened the test, I was having some serious heart palpitations. I "read" the first few questions with my eyes, without actually reading or digesting any of the information and, in those first few minutes, started to feel like I didn't know anything. I got increasingly nervous and had to take a second to breathe and calm myself down. Finally, by the 4th or 5th question, I came across something easy that I knew very well and, little by little, I settled in. Once I got over the nervousness, I started rolling through questions and felt that I was hitting my groove. I probably marked 15 or so questions per block, and went through the first 3-4 without taking a break. I took a short break to use the restroom and eat something quickly between 3/4 or 4/5 (don't remember which) and then continued through the rest of the test.
Post-test vibes: I honestly felt okay leaving the exam, and I don't just say that in hindsight. I think that because I had worked this test up to be such a monster in my head, I didn't feel that it was any harder than I had anticipated and, if anything, might have felt a bit easier than the expectations I had set. I elected not to look anything up afterwards, and successfully fought the urge. I figured that it would make me crazy over the next 3-4 weeks of waiting if I knew that I had gotten a bunch of questions wrong already and, of course, there's a ton of sampling bias in the questions that we look up afterwards - we tend to only dwell upon the questions that we didn't know rather than the multitude of others that we knew with certainty.
Expectations: I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of score. I had set my target range to be between 240-260, but based on my practice test performance, figured that the more reasonable range of expectations should probably be 235-250.
Real Deal: 260 - I still have no words about how all of this turned out. I'm so, so incredibly happy and thankful. To be honest with you, I cried. I hope that this is helpful to someone along the way and if anyone has any more specific questions, feel free to PM me and I'd be happy to answer them. Good luck to everyone!
