sounds like you are going a little bit overboard here. the review books may only get you a passing grade in your particular school, but that doesn't mean that they are worthless.
No, they aren't worthless at all. Passing is a good thing. However, for someone to pre-study, I would think that person is aiming for more than passing (that's my impression anyway). I do recommend review books and they have many important "high yield facts", but I personally find them to be inadequate and in some cases "useless" for some of my classes because those facts might be the very simplest questions or not be covered at all in a particular course.
the general consensus is that if you know first aid inside and out, and supplement with a few choice review books, you can really smoke step 1 with that information.
First Aid is good. I'm just not sure that reading First Aid before going to medical school is going to help most people. I find I can read a First Aid chapter very very quickly when I'm preparing for an exam because I have already studied that material previously. If you effortlessly memorize everything you read no matter what it is, then go for it. Read all the textbooks the summer before and then just perfect your knowledge during the year. Most people can't do that effectively.
in fact, there really ought to be a fairly good amount of overlap between you school's curriculum and the review books at large (granted not all review books are created equally, but the review books at large are purposed to help medical students do well on step 1, correct?), and if there is hardly any overlap, then your school obviously isn't doing all that great of a job preparing you for step 1 style questions, and it is even more imperative that you study some usmle style review books/questions along with whatever irrelevent minutae you particular professor requires you to memorize. or am i just crazy?
There is a fair amount of overlap and if you know the stuff in the review books ... that will help you. The USMLE type questions are more or less the basic ones that everyeone in the class should be getting. Those tend not be be the weed-out questions. We need to know more if you want to get the equivalent of an A; that's all. If your goal is to pass, there is simply no need to pre-study at all. As stated above, if you are a strong student, you will do fine. If you are a weak student, you won't be able to pre-study effectively. In the review books, sometimes the information is out of date (we are expected to know certain updated information). Sometimes it covers certain subjects very poorly or incompletely. If the review books were adequate, schools would be using them as textbooks. Our school has a very high STEP average. That said, if you are very restless and simply must beat your fists into the wind and find that therapeutic, then by all means, try to memorize First Aid, Robbins, Costanza, Moore, and all that. I just don't think an incoming pre-med could do that very effectively and would have a miniscule advantage.
theoretically, if a person were to memorize first aid before they started ms1, they would have an incredible amount of information relevent for step 1. of course, this isn't really practical, seeing as how you wouldn't have any context to help facilitate the understanding of the myriad of lists of factoids. nonetheless, if a person were to kill themselves during the last summer of their old life memorizing first aid, although the payoff would be relatively low compared to using first aid throughout ms1/2 and it would be regrettable to blow your last summer in such a dumb way, it wouldn't be totally useless.
True, it wouldn't be totally useless. Mopping a gym floor with a small toothbrush also isn't totally useless even though it would take a month to do what your average janitor could do in an hour or two. However, most people would not consider a month or two of effort to get a few days of knowledge to be a good use of anyone's time. This is especially true because the biggest problem in medical school is not inability to learn but burnout. If you are busting you tail before medical school, you might increase your chances of burn-out and doing more poorly. If you really enjoy reading First Aid, Robbins, Costanza, Moore, you will learn something. However, don't do it because you think it will take the edge off medical school, because it won't.
I love books and love what I'm learning in medical school. Learning is a good thing and it would be beneficial to read what you are interested in. However, I haven't met anyone who enjoys reading these books (First Aid, etc.) for fun (although I'm sure there are some out there). I enjoy reading them if I am reviewing or have a specific question or am doing research on something related to the textbook material. I don't just read these books cover to cover unless I'm studying for a test and I would say I'm one of the people who maybe likes the material more than average (although that doesn't make it easier for me, necessarily).
finally, i don't understand how you could have your anatomy 'down pat' and still do poorly in anatomy. does 'down pat' mean that you know the layout of the whole human body? if so, you would have to be pretty dumb to not study according to your professor's style if your 'down pat' anatomy knowledge was different from your professors... which would also be pretty weird, because aren't all bodies pretty close in organization? i'm just askin.
You don't prepare for a marathon by running marathons every day or by just practicing on your own without having any experience with competitive running. There is a method to the madness and it's hard to know how to train without knowing the exact path of your courses, how fast your competition will be, and without a competent trainer. Studying in medical school is different from studing in undergrad and just guessing about how to approach it won't get you very far. There is a lot more to anatomy than just being able to identify nerves, arteries, and muscles, etc. Also, your instructor may want you to know every detail in a certain part of the anatomy (including maybe the embryological development and origins) whereas a text or review book might only cover concepts. Similarly, a text might cover every detail of another subject (every named artery and vein in the brain) whereas your instructor only wants you to know the concepts and key features because you'll get the details in a different course later on, perhaps (neuro).
Anatomy professors have devised ways of making the material more difficult and to spread the grades out. You might know a muscle, its nerve, its blood supply and forget the precise attachment relative to other muscles in the immediate area and miss a question related to that. Everyone getting an "A" is not what medical schools are aiming for. They want a distribution of grades so that they can identify the strongest students. Think of it this way .. it's a race and your school wants to know who the fastest runners are so that they can make them AOA, give them the best recommendations for residency, etc. They also want the class overall to come out competent and represent the school well.
Most medical students will pass MS1; that's not the issue. When it comes to spreading out the grades, most medical schools increase the complexity and number of questions on the exams until they get a nice bell curve of grades with a few people at the very top, a few people failing, and everyone else smoothly distributed between that with a nice hump around an average grade of "B". Pre-studying for one summer before isn't going to leapfrog a student any more than self-training for a marathon for one summer prior to a marathon running "season" would suddenly help you outperform an Olympic marathon runner or really accomplish much when you will be going through a very rigorous training anyway. They don't expect you to pre-study, so don't waste your time. On the flip side of preparing poorly, you might even get bored as the class goes through material you know and then fail to pay attention to certain new details that will be on the exam ... thinking you know that part already.
If you know your anatomy well, you should be in good shape for learning MS1 anatomy. It helps. However, there will be people in your class who can learn the material very quickly and could outperform you on exams even though you started studying in the summer. The profs might show you a blurry overexposed X-ray from 1972 with something circled and ask what the symptoms of this defect are. There might be 3 or 4 different defects that could look similar to the defect circled in that location and you need to have some sense as to what the professor might be asking because a textbook and even less so, a review book, are not going to give you any clues as to which of the possible defects it is. You aren't going to fail the course if you don't know that particular defect, but you might get a "B" instead of an "A" thanks to missing questions like that. Knowing your anatomy will help you learn the material. You really can't get much of a running start into medical school except by developing good study habits, building up your memorization skills, and acquiring a nice fund of knowledge in your undergrad years. It's not the kind of thing were a few weeks of pre-study will make much of a difference at all.
Finally, I would say that many people really would find it difficult to cover the material as quickly as when they are taking a class where the is a certain amount of pressure to make a good grade and keep up with your peers. It's a rare bird who can memorize volumes of material without the pressure of keeping up in a class or a pending exam. The stress and competition of medical school is hard to replicate in self-study. Even with that pressure, most people wait until a week or two before the exam before they really go all-out in studying. You would need to have excellent self-discipline, a lot of information from former MS1 students at your school about what to study, and maybe a tutor for it to be effective. Considering that MS1 grades are probably among the least important and simplest med-school material, you probably won't find many MS2+'s who would encourage you to pre-study for MS1. One of the keys to success in medical school is efficiency and some semblance of balance between personal life and study; pre-studying for MS1 smacks of inefficiency and costs personal free-time that is very precious and progressively rare as you go through medical training.
