Man y'all are too supportive T_T
Me today
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I thought it was pretty hard, and I felt very heavy new NBME vibes on all 7 blocks. UWSA2, Free 120, and UW I felt are much more straightforward, while my exam and the new NBMEs had many questions where you just have to reason it out. The reason I hate these is you could convince yourself that your reasoning is correct and you got the question right, but in reality it's not what they're looking for at all. I'm fairly liberal when it comes to flagging questions, and it's always been a decent predictor when it comes to UW blocks at least. For example, if I flag 8, I'll assume I missed 8 on that block and maybe i'll get 5 flagged questions right, then 3 dumb mistakes/misunderstandings and end up with an 80. I ended up flagging ~9 per block today, which is higher than I would have liked to (was flagging around 6-7 on Free 120 and UWSA2). But again, easily 6 more per block that I didn't flag could have just been me incorrectly thinking through a lot of the problems which really worries me.
A few things I would have done differently:
- Go over ALL the lists/triads/pentads again from zanki, i.e HAMARTOMAS, MDD, Renal Cell Carcinoma, TTP, MEN, etc etc. Zanki has a bunch of them. I know them more or less just from doing Zanki throughout the years, but could have saved a lot of time if I sat down and really reviewed them and knew them cold.
- Review embryology and know it well. I hate embryology, and just put it off. Regrets rn lol.
- Review anatomy. The new NBMEs actually were fairly representative of the anatomy I had on my exam
- I know I wouldn't have listened to myself before taking it, but honestly I kinda wish I just watched Pathoma videos the night before. Even as my wife was driving me to the Prometric center I was going over a few things and some of those actually came up on my exam. Who knows what I would have gotten right if I watched a lot of Pathoma videos the night before. You'd be surprised at how many you can get through in ~4 hours. Many of the systems are 60-90 minutes long, so if you watch it on 1.5x you could finish watching 5 systems in Pathoma.
- The 2020 FA deck as well as the HY anatomy deck were pretty low yield and I don't remember any of it showing up on my exam. There's anatomy for sure, but I feel like the HY anatomy deck missed the mark when it came to what is on the actual exam. Wasted a ton of time on these decks.
Things that I did that ended up being really helpful
- I did 2 passes of Pathoma chapters 1-3 the last 4 weeks, doing 1 pass per 2 weeks. Holy crap this was HY on my exam.
- Making a separate deck for UW incorrects. At the beginning of dedicated I dreaded the thought of adding more cards but this turned out to be helpful. If I didn't feel like a factoid warranted a card, I made a google doc for UW incorrects as well and reviewed that sporadically. You don't know how beneficial this is until you finish all of UW and go back and work on your incorrects.
- This might be silly but... I got back into running. Maybe a month before dedicated I practiced a couple times wearing a mask doing practice problems and thought I was suffocating. Decided to run 4x/week and got my endurance up to where having a mask on didn't impact my breathing. But that might just be me being out of shape lolz
- I did NBME 16, 21, 22, and 24, and I wanna say I saw at least 3 questions repeated. Too bad I had no idea what I put last time or what the right answer was though.
- Praise be to Zanki
Anyways, I really don't know what to expect when it comes to my score. Left Prometric feeling very meh. Had low new NBMEs (21-220, 22-229, 24-227) and decent UWSAs (245 and 256) and Free 120 (85%). Reddit has me between 241 and 256, but I can only wish to hit 240+ right now. Hoping I did well enough to crack 230 but even that I'm not very optimistic. I gave it my all though, and truthfully despite wanting to have done a few things differently I have zero regrets.
usmle-score-correlation.blogspot.com
