Question Banks!!

[neoucomsucks]

Real quick everyone. I just want your opinions on this. Im saving qbank +qphiz for like my 5-6 wks of prep starting may-june. I was planning on doing BSS starting late dec through the remainder of the year but wanted to see if you think i should do usmlerx +usmleworld ( together 3600q's rather than bss 3850q) instead of BSS since i imagine those are systems based and would let me choose specific systems and only related questions whereas BSS clumps systems together. Also, we've only covered hem/onc, cardio, and in the middle of pulmonary module. Opinions and advice always welcomed since im an absolute idiot and in need of any help i can get.


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[SurgeryEire]

Here's my opinion...take it or leave it. I did well on boards and would recommend the following from my experience on the exam. Qbank is very detailed and not worth doing in the final prep up to the exam...I would recommend doing qbank now...do 100 questions a day random, every day and spend a few hours annotating your first aid...until it bleeds. My first aid has paper bits pouring out and there is not one square inch of space left...go through qbank until there are no more questions and you have noted everything from the explanations. Then do qbank again and even again if you can...if you can get through it six times do that...lay down the reaction pathways so that when you see a question you react with the answer...then in the month of the exam do the NBMEs every friday and USMLERx 100 -200 questions a day...this will make sure you know your first aid. It sounds like you're not worried about time or money so I would use these two banks + high yeild books + NBMEs to nail your score. I did the Kaplan followed by USMLERx technique with heavy annotating and reading through all of the High Yield Series and was successful...studied four weeks in total. Hope this helps.

 

[surprisedgirl]

Surgery....so you started doing hte questions at the very beginning of your studying, even before you had reviewed stuff? Did you end up learning as you were going along? Do you recommend that versus doin ga runthrough of hte materail then doing ?s. THANK YOU

 

[neoucomsucks]

You know what. That actually sounds like a good idea. The biggest thing from qbank i would imagine is learning the facts and putting it in the first aid. Which would seem like a beast to do a good job of knowing the exam is 4-6 weeks away and spending the hours at that time. I don't think estimating your performance by it is necessarily the best use of it but all of us ms2 get into thinking that and try to save it till last when what we should be using for that purpose is the nbme exams to tell us where we're at. And of course using the usmlerx at the end makes the most sense since it shows us how much of FA we know. Damn this sounds great. I just hope i have the guts to do it. Like surprised girl said did you go cold into it and use it primarily only to learn and not care how you were scoring on it?

 

[lord_jeebus]

I think the biggest benefit of QBank is seeing how questions for different diseases can be written in clinical format. With practice you can pick out the key things that differentiate the clinical presentation of similar conditions, and get you thinking "how would they have written the question if they were interested in X?"

Using QBank to learn facts that are not in First Aid is helpful but not as much as the practice with the exam format.

I structured my boards studying around what would give me the most new useful pieces of knowledge per unit time. At first, this is learning key concepts well in class so you don't have to relearn principles when you are reviewing later. Next, it was using review books to remind myself of facts and to pick up ones I had missed. Only in the last 4 weeks did I bring questions into the mix -- at first 50-100/day with a continued focus on review books. With 2 weeks to go I shifted to questions-only: 400-800 per day. With 2 days left I brought back First Aid to reinforce material most likely to appear on test day.

 

[SurgeryEire]

Surgery....so you started doing hte questions at the very beginning of your studying, even before you had reviewed stuff? Did you end up learning as you were going along? Do you recommend that versus doin ga runthrough of hte materail then doing ?s. THANK YOU

There is a misconception about the Step 1 exam that you only begin studying when you decide to study specifically for the exam when in effect the first two years of medical school have been the preparation for the exam through independant study and clinical experience. So yeah...I started with Kaplan Qbank before studying and did about 100 to 150 questions per day sometimes up to 400 about 5 weeks out and then spent time annotating my first aid, learning it absolutely cold until I was finished with Kaplan. It took me two weeks to finish Qbank. Sure I didn't get the greatest scores (started around 60 and pushed to low 80s by the end) but that's not the point...the subjects that appeared on my step 1 exam didn't go outside of the annotations I had in my first aid (with the exception of the molecular biology questions which are questions of logic). Then after first aid was annotated I picked up USMLERx as explained above and went through it about 3 times and also carried around note sheets (folded in half much like the recall series) with keywords and explanations from my first aid (annotated) until I had the whole book memorized cold. I must say that I also found a copy of the Goljan 100pp and read it the two days before my exam finding it to be an excellent review...didn't like his lectures though...would have much rather listened to music and read his high yield notes. In the end I got the score I wanted. If you have any specific questions I would be happy to answer them on PM regarding study, scores, practice test scores to correlate, etc.

 

[felicia2001uk]