Recent CK test takers after question pool change

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njmedstudent973

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I was wondering from anyone who recently wrote CK after the question pool changed if they found it still comparable to UWORLD questions and NBMES that are out there as far level of difficulty and score goes or was the level of difficulty/score far off? It's like everyone who wrote it before would say CK was a lot easier than Step 1 and now everyone who writes it is like wtf was that?! 😱
 
I know it's jarring to see something so unfamiliar pop up on a test, but I'll venture a guess and say that the point of the question was probably to see if you could apply what you know to a novel situation, not to see if you had memorized when and what IV cocaine is used for. E.g.

step 1-recall properties of cocaine (blocks reuptake of catecholamines and dopamine, vasoconstricts, blocks sodium channels and peripheral nerve conduction i.e. same mechanism as lidocaine)
step 2- apply what you know about cocaine to clinical situation at hand
step 3- ???
step 4- profit!

I had plenty of WTF questions too and I took my exam prior to the July 27th question pool change. My WTF questions were often like this; you have to take what you know and do the best you can with it to think through a weird situation you've never seen before. The WTF questions make you feel like you didn't do so well because you aren't 100% sure that you got all the answers right. All I can say is trust your practice tests.

As for other WTF questions, I too had weirdo public health/quality improvement questions...I had questions that seemed so vague and I was down to eliminating answer choices rather than knowing the diagnosis right off the bat in many instances. You feel like you're relying more on your intuition on step 2 and because of that, you feel less confident. This feeling is not unique to people who took the test after July 27th. Uworld and MTB/etc don't fully capture the content of what you actually see on test day; they never have and they never will.

I took the IFOM exam part 2 (http://www.nbme.org/ifom/) a couple of days ago. It's an exam done by the same people who make Step 1 and Step 2, and I thought exactly what you mentioned here, and I expect Step 2 to be harder. It was harder than UWorld. It requires more critical thinking (there are more extraneous information meant to confuse you) and the presentations are not typical. The basic diagnoses, diagnostic measures and management steps that you need to know do not change. It's just that you need to have excellent reading skills and a sharp judgement. You can best deal with uncommon presentations of common diagnoses by reading extensively on your patients during the whole clinical year.

I came out of the exam feeling that the most important thing is that you are well rested before the marathon, not how much info you managed to cram a few days before.

I'll be taking the exam in a couple of weeks, so crossing my fingers.
 
Those stupid public health/quality assurance questions were so random. I'm not taking this exam to be the CEO of a hospital, wtf. Felt like 2-3 things were viable answers per question. I will never know if I got those questions right or not.
 
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