Happy new year everyone!
Done so far:
- 1st pass of FA, while annotating Kaplan, BnB, CMMRS on it (used whatever I thought was best depending on the subject) [3 months]
- Around 3/4 of USMLERx, basically all organ system+ethics. Sitting at 87% so far. Solved blocks of 40, system-wise after doing a 2nd pass of careful reading of each corresponding FA chapter. [1,5 month]
My thoughts so far:
- I can already tell that starting with FA from day 1 and directly annotating any notes from other sources onto it has helped immensely.
- I expected that most of my mistakes would stem from either new topics I haven't come across yet or questions integrating stuff in a weird away or plain silly mistakes. Instead I 've found that the majority of my mistakes are pure memorization gaps. Stuff I studied, learnt and then completely forgot.
- I 've seen many people praising USMLERx, but I'd say it's a
good qbank at best (or even a mediocre one). It's good to reinforce some basic stuff but:
1) There's a lot of facts not tested/undertested while others are overtested. Topics like rheumatic fever and minimal change disease are so heavily repeated that I don't think anyone benefits from them.
2) Questions are so frequently miscategorized that I 've answered a good 10-15% of questions belonging to categories that I've never chosen in the first place. Also what's with the question of
23-year old female with an athletic body type having a skin fungal infection categorized as a reproductive question?
3) The quality of the questions varies greatly. You can easily tell questions that were written by different writers. There are questions that make good integration and mimic the long-stem questions of the real test (at least based on the experiences of most people), but the amount of one-liners or dead giveaways (eg giving away a single lab value that is very specific for a disease and not routinely performed instead of providing a regular lab panel with many results but which also includes this special test) seems imbalanced.
Of course I might have set my expectations too high. I haven't done any other Qbank except for around half the questions of Pastest just for practice while doing my 1st pass. I wouldn't recommend that one since I remember sending 5-10 corrections per block of 40.
Planning to do Kaplan after I'm done with USMLERx and then UWorld.
Damn, who's NOT upgrading to the 2019 FA? I've annotated too much valuable things into my FA 2018 already to give up on it now. I've seen some of the errata and updates, but it still bugs me not having the very latest text. I do have the kindle/pdf already.
I am definitely not upgrading to 2019 FA. Why waste so much effort into annotation on 2018 and $$ for nothing. I just got a neatly-made Word document with just the changes between the two. I'll just print those pages and add them to my binder. You can find that in the main Facebook group. Props to that guy who spent the time to do it.
