You have to chill with these posts. I understand that you're stressed and venting, but there are hundreds of people reading these threads, a lot of whom are currently in dedicated that are looking for motivation, confidence, and a clear mind. Your posts are doing nothing to help the users who are about to sit for their exam, or the users waiting to get their scores back. I have read through hundreds of pages of posts from step threads over the past few years, and I have never read a report of a person even coming close to dropping 50 points from their NBME average. Your friend's experience is an unbelievably rare incident.
I guarantee that you will score within a few points of your NBME average and UWSA2 score, just as the other 99.9% of posters who feel that they bombed the exam do.
This is a valid point, and I think maybe I'm conveying the wrong tone here with my posts. Honestly yes I'm pissed about my friend. I'm surprised about my other friends' scores, and yes I was venting about that. However, this test has been given for years and it's way more likely that the few experiences within my friend group are outliers. I'm sorry if I'm causing anyone anxiety as that wasn't my intent.
I'm honestly not
that concerned about my own score. I'm not just venting here for myself. I felt as though the NBMEs were far more representative of what I worked my butt off for with this exam, so yeah I'm still a little weird about it since I can't see the reasoning behind making the sports of changes they made. I guess I also felt like my friend's story needed to be told. These statistical outliers are exactly that: statistical outliers. My intent was for people to know that they do exist, however rare, and that this test has victims, so maybe think twice before judging someone by their score alone. My heart was reaching out to a guy who is currently on a medicine service texting me from the bathroom about how he's pretended he's got the runs today to hide his frequent panic attacks/anxiety spells. That's a living nightmare. But harping on and on about it is not productive. To anyone reading this: it won't happen to you just like you won't get struck by lightning on your way to the testing center. I've never heard of another case of a 50 point drop.
Someone asked about the style of questions, let me try to be helpful for once.
1) Questions were longer overall. This was the biggy for me as I read slowly. I'd typically finish UWorld sets at 45-48 minutes and check over answers until the timer ran out. On the real deal I think I averaged 5-7 minutes of check time, so it was flags only, which throws you off your game.
2) Questions were not meant to teach you anything, so of course they are different from UWorld. You're not going "okay, A represents MPGN, B is RPGN, etc..." It's more like, "I don't really recognize any of these pathological descriptions, which sounds most like MPGN? Maybe D? Okay we'll go with D." So you won't be eliminating all answers based on some solid factoid. Instead it's just that you'll be picking the best one. Of course POE still applies for most questions. Step just had a lot of the above relative to NBMEs.
3) Questions tested between the lines far more often than any practice materials. There's a lot of "most likely," going on, so you need some common sense. These were very vague, as sometimes you were wondering what makes one thing more likely than another. Is it overall prevalence? Risk factors? What if one answer is something common and the other answer is something that the patient has a risk factor for? Hard to answer those at the M2 level.
4) Few buzzwords, though there are more buzzword gimmes in there than anyone realizes because you fly through them.
5) More low yield than you'd expect from NBMEs. This includes non-FA anatomy or embryology, physio concepts from M1 that weren't emphasized since, etc... these questions will burn because you'll recognize them, but know that it was from some class lecture you blew off or have just forgotten.
6) Low yield within FA. The weird one-liners that never got their own UWorld question and you've likely never seen in an actual presentation before. The presentation is not always even the classic, so these were still tough in some cases, but doable if you know the disease.
7) Absolute nonsense. A small enough percentage of the test that you can effectively blow it off. Some of these are so insane they'll make you laugh. Hard to even come up with something comparable, but it would be on the order of showing you a frog's brainstem and asking you to identify an obscure nucleus. Maybe theoretically possible you could draw a comparison, but highly unlikely.
8) Lots of ethics, and far harder than NBMEs, which I found to be really easy compared to UWorld.
9) The classic "we didn't give you the information you'd always have in this workup, but here's one lab value" questions are prevalent.
Overall, I'm still not going to say it's a good test. I don't respect it so much because it wasn't a puzzle or complete clinical picture like UWorld. It was a lot of weird wording and obscure facts. It tested a lot of low yield, but 50% was still easily high yield resembling UWorld 60-70%ers. I stick by my statement that I think dedicated was helpful but not crucial if you're a Zanki/Bros user and you've got the basics down. This makes sense as most people who move the test up do well regardless of the missed studying. It really is just a broad, somewhat random sampling of your medical knowledge, but over 280 questions there is some evening out. Some people go way down or get bumped up, most don't. If you take anything from my post, it's don't freak out. You might get an easier form similar to NBMEs. You might get this new thing where they give you enormous paragraphs to read. It might be in between. Regardless, know thst most forms have some level of insanity so just buckle down and keep going.
Good luck everyone. I apologize for any heart attacks I may have caused.
