COMLEX Official 2019 Comlex 1 Experiences and Scores Thread

[ASGD1983]

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It's that time of the year. Anyone took new Comsae recently? Hopefully it's more predicitve than old ones that were all over the place - like +/- 100 points.
Also, interesting to hear if this years comlex is indeed changed? If anyone took it recently - please share your experience. Especially if you can compare it to previous year one.

 

[FedForPres]

Just to give hope to any others with a borderline comsae!

103: 395
105: 405 (2 days before exam)
Comlex: 511

 

[Noisewater-TDX]

Im gonna end up in family med... I shouldve went to freaking nurse practitioners school... Fml.

 

[Osteoimposter]

Im gonna end up in family med... I should went to freaking nurse practitioners school... Fml.

You’ll make more $ and be a doctor. Nobody that works at your office will have anything but respect for you. Only among elitists like medical students is FM a bad thing. It’s like being mad that you play for the dolphins instead of the patriots, you’re still in the NFL dude..

 

[bravenugget21]

Just to give hope to any others with a borderline comsae!

103: 395
105: 405 (2 days before exam)
Comlex: 511

Whoa that’s a huge difference. What was your uworld/qbank scores and what were you doing to prep?

 

[FedForPres]

Whoa that’s a huge difference. What was your uworld/qbank scores and what were you doing to prep?

Combank thru 2nd year was usually 50%. Only did half of Uworld (month subscription) at 44%. Post-Uworld: combank was 70-80%. Atleast 4k questions in total. Did zanki throughout 2nd year then only focused on lolnotacop and zanki pharm for the last 5 weeks. Hope that helps!

 

[bravenugget21]

Combank thru 2nd year was usually 50%. Only did half of Uworld (month subscription) at 44%. Post-Uworld: combank was 70-80%. Atleast 4k questions in total. Did zanki throughout 2nd year then only focused on lolnotacop and zanki pharm for the last 5 weeks. Hope that helps!

This gives me some hope. Haha congrats on finishing and getting a good score.

 

[Green1234]

Im gonna end up in family med... I shouldve went to freaking nurse practitioners school... Fml.

?? What was your score? Your life time earning potential will be higher as a doc even in FM.

 

[Noisewater-TDX]

?? What was your score? Your life time earning potential will be higher as a doc even in FM.

Dont know scores yet. Just have similar COMSAEs to people scoring in the 400s. I'll know Aug 1.

 

[Osteoguy1994]

Why do they release in batches? Like why not just rolling releases. Is each batch it’s own standardizing process?

 

[pseud0]

literally the only 2 reasons i dont want to do primary care:

I have 350k of loans
insurance sucks

 

[saigon.]

Hey Saigon, what was timeframe between comsaes and comlex roughly? Thank you

Took COMSAE C a week or two before the test. COMSAE D a month or two before.

Im gonna end up in family med... I shouldve went to freaking nurse practitioners school... Fml.

Don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure people in the 400s still have a good degree of maneuverability. Community IM, for instance. Obviously be realistic, but don't begrudgingly drag yourself into FM unless you absolutely have to. I'm quite fond of FM now, may even do rural FM, and I don't want to see other FM docs so down on their field because they felt it was the last option. I'm sure you got a fine score, anyways! Have faith!!!!!

 

[Spectreman]

You’ll make more $ and be a doctor. Nobody that works at your office will have anything but respect for you. Only among elitists like medical students is FM a bad thing. It’s like being mad that you play for the dolphins instead of the patriots, you’re still in the NFL dude..

Can’t love this enough, we have so much to be grateful for.

 

[ASGD1983]

I still wonder what is the main reason why some people get 170 points more on comlex (vs comsae) while others get 70 points less? Does it basically depend on whether or not you get all the right questions that you studied? Or is there a fatigue/speed-reading skills/mental endurance that decides if you are going to boost up or down?

 

[DNC127]

I still wonder what is the main reason why some people get 170 points more on comlex (vs comsae) while others get 70 points less? Does it basically depend on whether or not you get all the right questions that you studied? Or is there a fatigue/speed-reading skills/mental endurance that decides if you are going to boost up or down?

Its because boards is a crapshoot. Its the same reason some people get around a 240 on usmle yet a 700+, and others get a 250 and 525 (multiple people in my class). It just depends on if the test you take that day is your strength. I believe most people have a 100 point range on comlex and 15 point range on usmle they could get on any given day

 

[yanhoz]

Comsae 103 (2 weeks out): 529
Comsae 105 (4 days out): 581
COMLEX: 629
Step: 245

 

[Spectreman]

Fam, I hope everyone is reaching out to combank to tell them their self assessment predictor is trash.

 

[DrStephenStrange]

literally the only 2 reasons i dont want to do primary care:

I have 350k of loans
insurance sucks

Direct primary care is on the rise now. Great income, plus you don't have to deal with insurance.

 

[Green1234]

Its because boards is a crapshoot. Its the same reason some people get around a 240 on usmle yet a 700+, and others get a 250 and 525 (multiple people in my class). It just depends on if the test you take that day is your strength. I believe most people have a 100 point range on comlex and 15 point range on usmle they could get on any given day

Yeah the standard error for step is 8 so if you took the test 1000 times with your current knowledge 95 percent of the time your score would be + or - 16 which is pretty high considering the MCAT has a 2 for it's SE. The NBOME doesn't publish what comlex is but I'm betting it's probably high.

 

[AnatomyGrey12]

LOTS of people I know aren't very happy with their score. For every person that scored 70+ above their COMSAE average there are 2 or more people doing worse it seems.

 

[bishlamek_gurp_gork]

COMSAE form E: 680 (april)
COMLEX level 1 - 749 (june)

The new blue print, while frustrating, is not as bad as the stories. Sure some of the micro is obscure, there are some tough ekgs, and random clinical OMM that's just weird.

By far the biggest problem was the ever increasing loading time between questions, going back to check answers was an exercise in divine patience.
The videos were long but gave you a free point if you knew simple OMM. Nerves and testing conditions play a small but significant factor.

Timing was only an issue for about the 3/8 sections. Even then, I had about 5 min left to check my answers. By the last sections, I was finishing 20 minutes early. Although, if you weren't already doing that with your respective test banks, you were falling into the trap of actually reading the entire question stem. Big mistake. First sentence scan, last sentences (1-3), breeze through the answer choices to see if it's a diagnosis/mechanism/pathology/instant recall question, AND THEN read the stem FOR CLUES. Often times they just hand you the diagnosis/drug/disease and you just have to know why it's like that.

The real problem is if you weren't studying for COMLEX with UW (or already studying for STEP), you got shafted by COMLEX. It is very much an effort to emulate STEP, but more so a test of stamina than critical thinking. Actually, by about section 6, the questions were all pretty much first order.

STEP on the other hand was a lot more puzzle solving on the spot, finding new ways to ask old questions with vague stems that really made you think. With STEP, the stakes are way higher because towards the higher end of the spectrum each question can be worth multiple points on your score.

With COMLEX, you can get 40-60 questions wrong, and still score in the 95th+ percentile.

If you were using COMBANK to study, I imagine you got destroyed on the exam. It was infinitely harder than any of the previous practice tests they had. Kaplan is garbage. This has been my Ted talk.

UW2: 262 (april)
Form 18: 250 (april)
USMLE Step 1 - 250 (june)

 

[Noisewater-TDX]

With COMLEX, you can get 40-60 questions wrong, and still score in the 95th+ percentile.

... Let just say i only got 40-60 questions correct. What would be my percentile then?

 

[Mayanqwe]

So what Ive been reading for people who already took COMLEX is that COMQUEST/COMBANK suck and the closest thing to helping you on exam is UWORLD? I have 3 weeks until my exam and am trying to decide which question bank should I use now since I was hoping to finish COMQUEST and that it would help with the exam....

Or does someone disagree???? ( I sure hope so because I've been chugging through COMQUEST 😢)

 

[Spectreman]

LOTS of people I know aren't very happy with their score. For every person that scored 70+ above their COMSAE average there are 2 or more people doing worse it seems.

Well crap lol. That’s terrifying.

 

[AnatomyGrey12]

So what Ive been reading for people who already took COMLEX is that COMQUEST/COMBANK suck and the closest thing to helping you on exam is UWORLD? I have 3 weeks until my exam and am trying to decide which question bank should I use now since I was hoping to finish COMQUEST and that it would help with the exam....

Or does someone disagree???? ( I sure hope so because I've been chugging through COMQUEST 😢)

UWorld is the king. It all kinda sucks though, from what I've seen with classmates is that COMLEX was a total crapshoot. Some people went from mid 400s on COMSAEs to mid to high 500s, and the exact opposite. I have even heard of someone who went from high 500s on the COMSAEs to below 450. Step doesn't correlate at all lol, people with high Step scores and very average COMLEX scores all over the place.

So in case anyone is paying attention, take Step because COMLEX is garbage. (we already knew this)

 

[Sunnyprhr]

So, I got my score yesterday. 563 on COMLEX. 486 on 104, 520 on 105, 1 week between 105 and the test.

 

[Mayanqwe]

So, I got my score yesterday. 563 on COMLEX. 486 on 104, 520 on 105, 1 week between 105 and the test.

Congrats! What test bank did you use to study and did you feel like it was at par with the exam?

 

[getfat]

Haha anyone Not getting scores until Aug 1? Any thoughts on passing the time lol

We can start our own thread haha.

 

[Sunnyprhr]

Congrats! What test bank did you use to study and did you feel like it was at par with the exam?

Thank you so much! I used UWORLD, then COMQUEST the last week

 

[Medic741]

Its because boards is a crapshoot. Its the same reason some people get around a 240 on usmle yet a 700+, and others get a 250 and 525 (multiple people in my class). It just depends on if the test you take that day is your strength. I believe most people have a 100 point range on comlex and 15 point range on usmle they could get on any given day

So what Ive been reading for people who already took COMLEX is that COMQUEST/COMBANK suck and the closest thing to helping you on exam is UWORLD? I have 3 weeks until my exam and am trying to decide which question bank should I use now since I was hoping to finish COMQUEST and that it would help with the exam....

Or does someone disagree???? ( I sure hope so because I've been chugging through COMQUEST 😢)

If you don’t use UWORLD you will be at a serious disadvantage against your peers — I’d get on it!!!

Also, I can’t recommend omtreview.com for OMM review highly enough. The dedicated qbank that Saverese wrote was a game changer on COMLEX

 

[cjcarter]

So what Ive been reading for people who already took COMLEX is that COMQUEST/COMBANK suck and the closest thing to helping you on exam is UWORLD? I have 3 weeks until my exam and am trying to decide which question bank should I use now since I was hoping to finish COMQUEST and that it would help with the exam....

Or does someone disagree???? ( I sure hope so because I've been chugging through COMQUEST 😢)

I seem to have had a different experience with COMLEX than most people on here. I did UW 1.5 times for step and then I had a week between step and COMLEX and did like 50-100 COMBANK questions a day. I thought COMLEX was pretty similar to COMBANK for the most part. Questions were pretty straightforward like COMBANK and more basic than step. Idk I didn’t think it was bad but I may have just gotten lucky. I have heard that COMQUEST is trash tho, I didn’t use it at all so I can’t say for certain.

 

[pseud0]

I seem to have had a different experience with COMLEX than most people on here. I did UW 1.5 times for step and then I had a week between step and COMLEX and did like 50-100 COMBANK questions a day. I thought COMLEX was pretty similar to COMBANK for the most part. Questions were pretty straightforward like COMBANK and more basic than step. Idk I didn’t think it was bad but I may have just gotten lucky. I have heard that COMQUEST is trash tho, I didn’t use it at all so I can’t say for certain.

I've heard similar stuff to this from peers. I really think its simply that some combination forms from their bank were insane and some ended up easier

 

[Osteoguy1994]

How many experimental questions do they usually have on Comlex?

 

[Noisewater-TDX]

How many experimental questions do they usually have on Comlex?

I asked one of the item writers at my school about that a few months back. He said "at least several dozen."

 

[bishlamek_gurp_gork]

... Let just say i only got 40-60 questions correct. What would be my percentile then?

I believe that is a fail haha, I think you're cutting it pretty close to a 400 (minimum pass) with only 50% of the questions right.

 

[Osteoguy1994]

I asked one of the item writers at my school about that a few months back. He said "at least several dozen."

So like how do they even work? Like they just don’t count, they’re curved a certain way, etc

 

[Noisewater-TDX]

So like how do they even work? Like they just don’t count, they’re curved a certain way, etc

No clue. I guess they just don't count and may or may not be used as actual question on future forms.

 

[Alkaidius]

The new blue print, while frustrating, is not as bad as the stories. Sure some of the micro is obscure, there are some tough ekgs, and random clinical OMM that's just weird.

Timing was only an issue for about the 3/8 sections. Even then, I had about 5 min left to check my answers. By the last sections, I was finishing 20 minutes early. Although, if you weren't already doing that with your respective test banks, you were falling into the trap of actually reading the entire question stem. Big mistake. First sentence scan, last sentences (1-3), breeze through the answer choices to see if it's a diagnosis/mechanism/pathology/instant recall question, AND THEN read the stem FOR CLUES. Often times they just hand you the diagnosis/drug/disease and you just have to know why it's like that.

The real problem is if you weren't studying for COMLEX with UW (or already studying for STEP), you got shafted by COMLEX. It is very much an effort to emulate STEP, but more so a test of stamina than critical thinking. Actually, by about section 6, the questions were all pretty much first order.

No offense but the guy that scored 700+ saying "not as bad" is definitely not a convincing case lol, I definitely disagree with that. Personally, I never felt like I had any "easy" first order sections (of course I'm also a bit thick). Mine felt far more evenly scattered with the exception of a desolate wasteland period where I went through about 50 questions without a microbe oasis. That said I completely agree with your UWorld assessment, it's kinda what I suspected was going to happen but I just wasn't as prepared for it as I thought...

My big beef with this new COMLEX isn't that it's ridiculous, it's that we don't have something equally as ridiculous to use as an example. It was like being asked to take a drivers license test in a manual after only practicing automatic. They're both cars, they both basically work the same way, but some people just don't adjust on the fly as well. I think the fact that the COMSAEs were ABSOLUTELY nothing like the new test is the epitome of negligence on the NBOME's end. You probably didn't use an undergrad textbook to study for the MCAT right? Question style matters.

 

[Osteoguy1994]

More or less it looks like the only correlation is that people crushing the comsae a (600 or greater) are doing very well or better on Comlex and borderline comsae to borderline Comlex. The 80% in the middle it’s like darts blind folded lol

 

[Osteoguy1994]

Simply put so far comsaes seem pretty useless. Something NBoMe probabaly figured out when they had to tell colleges “hey wait our bad these aren’t helpful ignore us for a hot second”

 

[Marrowist]

Fam, I hope everyone is reaching out to combank to tell them their self assessment predictor is trash.

I could have told you that 2 years ago when I first used the qbank. Trash is trash.

 

[Marrowist]

UWorld is the king. It all kinda sucks though, from what I've seen with classmates is that COMLEX was a total crapshoot. Some people went from mid 400s on COMSAEs to mid to high 500s, and the exact opposite. I have even heard of someone who went from high 500s on the COMSAEs to below 450. Step doesn't correlate at all lol, people with high Step scores and very average COMLEX scores all over the place.

So in case anyone is paying attention, take Step because COMLEX is garbage. (we already knew this)

BIG CASHEW IS NOT PLEASED

 

[Marrowist]

Moral of the story: All the old formulas held true. COMSAEs are still not good predictors for COMLEX. Study for Step 1 and you will do fine on COMLEX. UFAP is still king. Anki decks for OMM. Truelearn sucks, etc etc.

 

[jets46]

... Let just say i only got 40-60 questions correct. What would be my percentile then?

I relate hard to this

 

[pinkprincess246]

Combank thru 2nd year was usually 50%. Only did half of Uworld (month subscription) at 44%. Post-Uworld: combank was 70-80%. Atleast 4k questions in total. Did zanki throughout 2nd year then only focused on lolnotacop and zanki pharm for the last 5 weeks. Hope that helps!

did you take step 1?

 

[pinkprincess246]

COMSAE form E: 680 (april)
COMLEX level 1 - 749 (june)

The new blue print, while frustrating, is not as bad as the stories. Sure some of the micro is obscure, there are some tough ekgs, and random clinical OMM that's just weird.

By far the biggest problem was the ever increasing loading time between questions, going back to check answers was an exercise in divine patience.
The videos were long but gave you a free point if you knew simple OMM. Nerves and testing conditions play a small but significant factor.

Timing was only an issue for about the 3/8 sections. Even then, I had about 5 min left to check my answers. By the last sections, I was finishing 20 minutes early. Although, if you weren't already doing that with your respective test banks, you were falling into the trap of actually reading the entire question stem. Big mistake. First sentence scan, last sentences (1-3), breeze through the answer choices to see if it's a diagnosis/mechanism/pathology/instant recall question, AND THEN read the stem FOR CLUES. Often times they just hand you the diagnosis/drug/disease and you just have to know why it's like that.

The real problem is if you weren't studying for COMLEX with UW (or already studying for STEP), you got shafted by COMLEX. It is very much an effort to emulate STEP, but more so a test of stamina than critical thinking. Actually, by about section 6, the questions were all pretty much first order.

STEP on the other hand was a lot more puzzle solving on the spot, finding new ways to ask old questions with vague stems that really made you think. With STEP, the stakes are way higher because towards the higher end of the spectrum each question can be worth multiple points on your score.

With COMLEX, you can get 40-60 questions wrong, and still score in the 95th+ percentile.

If you were using COMBANK to study, I imagine you got destroyed on the exam. It was infinitely harder than any of the previous practice tests they had. Kaplan is garbage. This has been my Ted talk.

UW2: 262 (april)
Form 18: 250 (april)
USMLE Step 1 - 250 (june)

how do you know that you can get 40-50 q;s wrong and still be in the 95th percentile?

 

[pinkprincess246]

for those who have takem the exam how many q's did you mark per section?

 

[Medic741]

for those who have takem the exam how many q's did you mark per section?

Might have been an odd one out, marked 3-4 per section I was 50/50 on, ended up w a 682

 

[sunshinefl]

for those who have takem the exam how many q's did you mark per section?

I usually marked ~12-16 per section

 

[jets46]

Lol I guess I’m the odd one out. I marked around 18-20. By the last sections, I started marking the ones I thought I got right so there’d be less marks. Future 399 score at your service. Now officially low key freaking out.

 

[jets46]

I asked one of the item writers at my school about that a few months back. He said "at least several dozen."

Hopefully the several dozen are the ones I had no clue on and not the ones We knew!