There is no point in doing this, unless you absolutely need your score earlier for some reason. This test pool modification happens almost every year, it's not like they're making some "new" version of the test. Don't let it stress you out so much.
That's happened to me too. One thing that was weird was that I have my questions set to only "Medium" and "Hard." I don't recall manually setting those up myself so maybe Rx just had that set as default originally? Anyway, pretty weird. Also, there are still a lot of questions showing up as 0% on the answer breakdowns lol
Side note, I've finally hit that point of improvement on Rx. I was stuck at like a 55% like clockwork on every set of 40 that I did to the point where I could straight up predict it was coming. Now I've moved up to the mid-70s so that feels good. Haha.
Thanks a lot Pepe, that made me feel better. I have a friend who gave it last Friday and said that the questions were nothing like nbmes in the sense nothing was straightforward/easy. Also a lot of people I know scored 260 on the Uworld self assessment and ended up getting around 240. Anyone else think they over predict?
Because I’m a micromanager, I really enjoyed Cramfighter for schedule building.
My dedicated schedule thus far has been to do another complete pass through First Aid and another complete pass through UWorld, with practice tests interspersed every 5-6 days. So that generally shakes out to about 90 UWorld questions per day, 15-20 pages of reading First Aid in excruciating detail and trying to correlate each part to my general knowledge base, and some Anki.
I second Cram Fighter! It's a great resource; you just put in everything that you want to do and you can sort it by subject so that it correlates it for you. For my "Phase 1" studying (i.e. doing a first pass of everything while class was still in session) I put in First Aid, Pathoma text, Pathoma videos, and UWorld with catch-up days. I currently have it set only for First Aid and UWorld.
WOW! CBSE of <200 to a 260 in only a few months!! That's incredible. Congratulations!
I don't know how much I can add to this thread that hasn't already been said, but I'll try my best. I used UFAP and sketchy and a little kaplan at the end and nothing else special. I think my secret ingredient (and the one for others who achieve high scores) was just plain hard work: 13 hrs a day Monday-Saturday with one half day on Sundays for 9ish weeks. I think step is probably 85-90% hard work and 10-15% how "smart" you are. You also just have to be brutally honest with yourself about your weaknesses and whether or not you are really effectively using your time. As a general rule, you can know where you are weakest by thinking about what you want to do the least. Hit whatever that subject is as hard as you can and before you know it, you'll be hoping you get a question on it. An old marine saying my dad told me: "the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat"
Thanks man, what a crazy ride. Glad it's over. I'm an ortho hopeful as well, so maybe see you on the trail (though we'll never know haha)
Thank you very much! I'm very happy. As I stated above, I think anyone who is committed and really willing to go all-in can score way above their predicted potential
Sorry, don't check this much. For dedicated I inputted:
It only gives me info from 2016: 228 (21). This sheet is exactly the same with more info: http://www.usmle.org/pdfs/transcripts/USMLE_Step_Examination_Score_Interpretation_Guidelines.pdf
after finishing pathoma did u go through pathology in First Aid again or just pathoma enough ??
The female reproductive chapters of pathoma stand out to me as the main chapters that seemed to have a decent chunk of extra info not covered in first aid. First aid's female repro pathology section is also just pretty terribly organized from what I can remember.
I went through first aid again. I highly recommend doing that as well. I actually recommend FA path content over pathoma, but I found pathoma videos invaluable for understanding much of the content in FA. I watched the videos and then went through the first aid content afterward to fill in any gaps (FA covers a lot of important stuff that the pathoma book doesn't).Overall, I actually recommend annotating the content of the pathoma videos into the sections in FA and then using FA as your primary resource.
I've heard on the streets that UW2 is a relatively good predictor of your actual score and NBME 19 has an insane curve that wrecks your confidence. I haven't taken either yet so I can't comment on that, but I think everyone should take as many practice tests as possible!
