Practice Questions for step 1 prep

[happening6]

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How important is doing practice questions from QBanks. Should I spend more time review the books, to make sure i can remember most of the things rock solid. Will not doing practice questions hurt my score, even if i am well though with the material. One might think this is a stupid question, but i am debating myself to see which technique will help me maximize my score. Thanks for the time.

 

[ipizzy]

depends on your learning style, but I don't see how you could expect to do exceptionally well if you had never gone through the process of actually applying the material you read in books.

 

[pokemone]

How important is doing practice questions from QBanks. Should I spend more time review the books, to make sure i can remember most of the things rock solid. Will not doing practice questions hurt my score, even if i am well though with the material. One might think this is a stupid question, but i am debating myself to see which technique will help me maximize my score. Thanks for the time.

I was having a little bit of the same dilemma. I'm still trying to find the right balance between time spent in reading and trying to absorb the material and time I spend doing questions.

 

[shan564]

I think it's ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to do lots and lots of practice questions. You can't possibly learn all of medicine, so it's great to do some HIGH-QUALITY questions so that you have a good idea of what sorts of things they like to ask you on the real exam.

You don't have to focus on practice questions in the study process, but you should definitely do at least one full question bank.

 

[elektroshok]

I spent like 70/30 split between questions and reading from books

 

[Shadowmoses]

I just started doing questions, and they are an eye opener to the those details you do read in the review books but never think about again.

 

[gravitywave]

there is no debate. people who don't use a Qbank are more likely to fail the exam.

the #1 mistake people make is to not do enough questions.

 

[mmmcdowe]

there is no debate. people who don't use a Qbank are more likely to fail the exam.

the #1 mistake people make is to not do enough questions.

Questions are very important, to say the least. I saw a graph where there was a pretty strong relationship between questions and score cut offs. Suffice it to say that people doing very few questions were more likely to fail and less likely to get a high score than people doing tons of questions. I can't remember if it was from Kaplan or First Aid, though.

 

[shan564]

I've done about 2000 questions in the last month, and it's had an unbelievable impact on my practice test scores. I've also been reviewing FA, but I think the questions have had a bigger impact. Even after 500 questions (at which point I'd only been through a couple of sections in FA), I noticed a big improvement in my own performance.

Most of the experts say that you have to do at least 1000 questions in a high-quality bank before you start to notice an improvement in your scores. That estimate was almost right on the dot for me... after I finished about 1000 questions, my Qbank scores almost suddenly jumped from about 55% (in UW) to about 62% in Kaplan and about 64% in UW, which is estimated to be about a 20-25 point increase in 3-digit score based on the infamous conversion table. I think that once you get through 1000 questions, you're at the point where you've seen most of the topics that are likely to show up on the test.