One pass of UWorld?

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jonpalnile

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If I'm slow with UW then my plan would be:
7am wake up and do 1 block
9am review the block
Go through as much Savarese, Pathoma, FA, sketchy as possible, go to sleep.
rinse and repeat for 2 months (40 questions/day = finish UW in 2 months)

So would one pass of UW be enough for COMLEX?
 
Last edited:
Couple things, all of which depend on how high you are shooting for.

1. First off, are you SURE you get a 1.5mos of dedicated time? Make sure that will actually be dedicated time and not time spent doing useless DO school BS. If you actually get 6wks off, congrats man.
2. Related to that, do not assume the months leading to dedicated will be light. Just about everyone in our school kept saying, "Okay... that was more annoying than I wanted, but this next month will be easy... right?"
3. Are you planning to take Step 1? If so, how high are you shooting?
4. Do not study anything OMM related until dedicated, and even that might be too early. Savarese is an absolute dog-crap book that was outclassed by some of my classmates half-ass putting together their own studyguides. Savarese does not even exist in the same realm as UFAPS in terms of quality.
5. I am indeed one of those people who took forever to review a single Uworld block, but even by dedicated I was going through two blocks a day. Just make sure you don't spend too much time on each question and keep moving.
6. As for your last question, I did one pass of Uworld and did above average on COMLEX and below average on Step. I spent too much time making flashcards/notes instead of just reviewing or retaking questions. As NecFasc said, the more ?s the merrier.

PS, 7. Seriously, screw Savarese.
 
Depends on how well prepared you are from class. I did one pass of uw and ended up with complex > 750 but I was prepared well from remembering lots of class info.
 
FourniersGreenGang said:
Depends on how well prepared you are from class. I did one pass of uw and ended up with complex > 750 but I was prepared well from remembering lots of class info.
Click to expand...

Lets say average student with average level of preparedness
 
Sardonix said:
Couple things, all of which depend on how high you are shooting for.

1. First off, are you SURE you get a 1.5mos of dedicated time? Make sure that will actually be dedicated time and not time spent doing useless DO school BS. If you actually get 6wks off, congrats man.
Yup just around 6 wks

2. Related to that, do not assume the months leading to dedicated will be light. Just about everyone in our school kept saying, "Okay... that was more annoying than I wanted, but this next month will be easy... right?"
From what I've heard, the 6 wks leading up to it are easier (let's say at least ~4 hrs/day for boards)
3. Are you planning to take Step 1? If so, how high are you shooting?
Idk...if I am 100% sure I can get at least a 220
4. Do not study anything OMM related until dedicated, and even that might be too early. Savarese is an absolute dog-crap book that was outclassed by some of my classmates half-ass putting together their own studyguides. Savarese does not even exist in the same realm as UFAPS in terms of quality.
5. I am indeed one of those people who took forever to review a single Uworld block, but even by dedicated I was going through two blocks a day. Just make sure you don't spend too much time on each question and keep moving.
6. As for your last question, I did one pass of Uworld and did above average on COMLEX and below average on Step. I spent too much time making flashcards/notes instead of just reviewing or retaking questions. As NecFasc said, the more ?s the merrier.

PS, 7. Seriously, screw Savarese.
Click to expand...
 
Went over it once. Tried to do it again, but remembered too many answers for it to be useful. Ended up getting average scores. YMMV.
 
jonpalnile said:
So a presentation given by someone from the educational resources dept at my school discussed how in order to do decent on COMLEX/Step it is necessary to do A LOT of questions (I believe she said 4,000-5,000 qs). The thing is that I am looking at our schedule and I am just not sure if that is feasible IF I end up being one of those students that can only do 1 block of Uworld/day at maximum. I know it might be a minority but some students take ~5-6 hrs to review a single UW block. And Uworld only has like 2400 questions total. We get like a month and a half of dedicated. I am hopeful that the two months leading up to dedicated are light so I can do some boards studying at that time as well.

If I'm slow with UW then my plan would be:
7am wake up and do 1 block
9am review the block
Go through as much Savarese, Pathoma, FA, sketchy as possible, go to sleep.
rinse and repeat for 2 months (40 questions/day = finish UW in 2 months)

So would one pass of UW be enough for COMLEX?
Click to expand...
So my understanding is your school advisor said to do 5000 questions but you think you may only want to do 2400 and you want to have sdn posters tell you it is okay to ignore your school advisor. Why not follow your advisor's advice? Are your classmates going to ignore the advice?
 
If you search online or get opinions, you're going to get whatever you want to hear. I don't think there's a right way, but I do think it would be wise to judge your methods with NBME scores. Even with that caveat, some top scorers at my school only utilized 1 NBME :/.
 
jkdoctor said:
So my understanding is your school advisor said to do 5000 questions but you think you may only want to do 2400 and you want to have sdn posters tell you it is okay to ignore your school advisor. Why not follow your advisor's advice? Are your classmates going to ignore the advice?
Click to expand...

To be fair, getting a 2nd opinion and checking what your school admin/advisor tells you is always a valid move.

In the mean time OP, you should definitely aim for two passes of Uworld, but if you only get one pass in it is not the end of the world if you're not gunning for more competitive specialties. It's good that you're planning ahead, but the real test will be if you stick to the plan throughout this semester.
 
This is probably the research your class counselors are referring when they are making the claims.
Student-directed retrieval practice is a predictor of medical licensing examination performance


"
All students reported using practice MCQs (mean 3870, SD 1472). Anki and Firecracker users comprised 31 and 49 % of respondents, respectively. In a multivariate regression model, significant independent predictors of Step 1 score included MCQs completed (unstandardized beta coefficient = 2.2 × 10− 3, p < 0.001), unique Anki flashcards seen (B = 5.9 × 10− 4, p = 0.024), second-year honours (B = 1.198, p = 0.002), and MCAT score (B = 1.078, p = 0.003). Test anxiety was a significant negative predictor (B= − 1.986, p < 0.001). Unique Firecracker flashcards seen did not predict Step 1 score. Each additional 445 boards-style practice questions or 1700 unique Anki flashcards was associated with an additional point on Step 1 when controlling for other academic and psychological factors. "

Do what works for you. Try to grind out some uworld questions before dedicated.
 
Just putting this out there, but if you started doing 1 block/day of 40 questions starting January 1 you would complete both Kaplan & UWorld (~4000 questions) by early May. That leaves plenty of time for a second pass of UWorld or using another QBank for dedicated. It's not too late to start something like that now.

If you want to just do 2 passes of UWorld by the time you sit for boards, you could even just do 20/day or 40 every other day.
 
jkdoctor said:
So my understanding is your school advisor said to do 5000 questions but you think you may only want to do 2400 and you want to have sdn posters tell you it is okay to ignore your school advisor. Why not follow your advisor's advice? Are your classmates going to ignore the advice?
Click to expand...

The thing is that our school administration has a history of saying wrong things. I would rather talk to a few 3rd years from my school and get the opinion of a bunch of sdners than blindly follow them.
 
NecrotizingFasciitis said:
Just putting this out there, but if you started doing 1 block/day of 40 questions starting January 1 you would complete both Kaplan & UWorld (~4000 questions) by early May. That leaves plenty of time for a second pass of UWorld or using another QBank for dedicated. It's not too late to start something like that now.

If you want to just do 2 passes of UWorld by the time you sit for boards, you could even just do 20/day or 40 every other day.
Click to expand...

Honestly your plan sounds reasonable but our schedule for the first couple months is brutal (neuro). From my experience, whenever 3rd years tell me "that block is brutal" I always end up studying all day and still end up skipping some of the lectures. Multiple students from last year told me that they straight up never even looked at some of the lectures before the exam because the content was so high.

Wouldn't it be better to really focus on neuro and supplement it with pathoma and other resources so that it sticks to my longterm memory than trying to do it alongside a qbank?
 
jonpalnile said:
Honestly your plan sounds reasonable but our schedule for the first couple months is brutal (neuro). From my experience, whenever 3rd years tell me "that block is brutal" I always end up studying all day and still end up skipping some of the lectures. Multiple students from last year told me that they straight up never even looked at some of the lectures before the exam because the content was so high.

Wouldn't it be better to really focus on neuro and supplement it with pathoma and other resources so that it sticks to my longterm memory than trying to do it alongside a qbank?
Click to expand...

Ya for sure. If you do happen to have time though, you could even just do the neuro Q's from the QBank along with class so that you're double dipping.
 
One pass of uworld is fine as long as you're reviewing and retaining and it isn't your only form of active boards studying. Try to do some rx or Kaplan along with classes before uworld. I didn't waste a second studying omm until the 2 days between step and comlex and recommend the same. Did well on both tests
 
You don’t NEED anything outside ufaps but if you like questions you can somewhat replace FA with RX.
Don’t really recommend any other qbank except some bank for omm
 
More questions gets you higher scores up to a certain point.

I started with 10-20 a day in January, and gradually increased them up to a block a day just before dedicated, then 2-3 blocks a day during dedicated. According to my Excel sheet question tracker I hit 4500 questions doing that, not including practice tests. I would spend about 3-5 minutes per question so ~2hrs a block reviewing the answers. It paid off pretty well for me.

Pacing yourself is key. You might only be at 2k questions or so come May and think that you're behind because classmates have done 6k, but you can't let that get to you. I can tell you definitively that they aren't learning anything by blowing through 200+ questions a day like some people in my class did.
 
The more questions you do and the more comfortable you are with being able to use your knowledge the better you'll do. That being said a legitimate review of uworld should take 3hours per every 40 question block. Even for step 2 I was reviewing every 40 questions for about 2 hours as there is a ton of material you can stem off of the original question or question choices.
 
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