Q bank exploitation

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zion

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Hi everyone. When using Q bank, do you think it is wise to just do questions even if we haven't reviewed the material. IE do some neuro questions even before reviewing neuro material from HY?

Thx

happy studying!
 
Why would you do questions before studying the material? You'll be wasting the questions that way. At least study first in order to "LEARN" from doing the questions. You wouldn't want to shoot yourself in the foot would you?
 
i can understand if you're trying to do a few questions before you jump into full studying... since technically we've all learned neuro and you want to test to see how much you know... but i agree that it is a waste of questions and you'll probably get a lot wrong and flip out...

what i did (for neuro for example): I would read first aid neuro, read brs path on neuro, then do 15 ?s on Qbank to see how I stood... then went through again with all my other suppl. book (HY neuro) and wrote stuff into first aid... its amazing how far just first aid and BRS path will get you on Qbank
 
kaboodle said:
Why would you do questions before studying the material? You'll be wasting the questions that way. At least study first in order to "LEARN" from doing the questions. You wouldn't want to shoot yourself in the foot would you?

If you take the advice of SDN "allstars" they invariably advise working several thousand Q's from many different question sets (Qbank, Qbook, BSS, NMS, etc.) It wouldn't be possible to work through this many questions during the 4 weeks set aside to memorize First Aid. Many people begin working on Qbank after Dec.
 
I've just started...but I'm doing questions before studying the material: do a question, read the answer, look it up, learn something new. There was a study that just came out that gave some validation to my own philosophy that I learn much more efficiently by testing myself instead of just reading paragraph upon paragraph of text. It's worked well for my med school classes so far...so we'll see...
 
I fully agree w/ using tons of questions as a great way to re-enforce material, but I still fail to see how when you are first starting to study for the boards (ie a couple months out or so) that it would be beneficial to do questions on subjects that you have not begun to review. I would have assumed that for the first few weeks/months of board prep that students studied certain topics during one part of the day and did questions on that subject during the same relative time period (ie w/i a few days). I totally understand and agree that as the boards approach (ie < 1 month out or so) that one should do random questions in order to re-enforce EVERYTHING, but that type of review would only come after already studying every topic to some degree.

Bear in mind that I'm an MSI.....so I'm pretty much just an outsider looking in here...but I am curious to see what current and prior test-takers think about the approach of doing random questions from the get-go (ie w/o reviewing that subject at all yet). I think it would be really frustrating to do it that way.
 
closertofine said:
I've just started...but I'm doing questions before studying the material: do a question, read the answer, look it up, learn something new. There was a study that just came out that gave some validation

Do you happen to have a source? I believe you, but I'd like to read the available literature on this issue.
 
Taus said:
I fully agree w/ using tons of questions as a great way to re-enforce material, but I still fail to see how when you are first starting to study for the boards (ie a couple months out or so) that it would be beneficial to do questions on subjects that you have not begun to review..

If I was hovering in the 40th or 50th % I would agree totally.

I wouldn't advise everyone to begin early...but if you've retained a good amount of the information and you're doing well on random blocks of 50, then I don't see why it would be a waste? I don't feel like I'm wasting the questions by any means...actually, I'm hoping it will help as a cumulative review for our upcoming Path and Pharm Boards. I ultimately plan to make it through Qbank twice...and this would be impossible without an early start.

I am amazed that BigFrank was able to get through Q bank first time with an 80% overall 😱 Maybe he was taking subject specific blocks...either way, he's in a different league.

This thread would do well to get some input from those that have already taken the step...
 
If i could go back and restudy and take step 1, I would have done more questions. Dont worry about wasting questions, there are tons of great questioins out there. Qbank is good, so is qbook, Appleton Lange, NMS, Many people that scored high did BSS, so there's no need to worry about running out of questions. At the same time, try to read and refresh as much as u cann too. You can learn tons from the explanations and it puts u in a good test taking frame of mind where u can pick out the right answer even if its written in spanish.

But i remember when i was taking the USMLE last year, not much of the test was in the books, u kind of had to figure it out right there. I will say that First Aid and these other HY notes can give u alot of free points, but to truly ace the test, u gotta master doing questions. Its just like the MCAT, people did a bunch of practice mcats and got a good score at the end.
 
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