Is Robbins Review a waste of time ? ..... I've been doing it along with Pathoma & find it to be very useful but it blows away a lot of time ..... some of the stuff I'm learning may not be HY ... I'm worried that I'm wasting my time .... I still have 8 weeks to go for exam & have to complete both Kaplan & UW....... Should I continue ..
I did Robbins RR questions last year and found them
difficult at the time (I would score between 67-80ish% on the question blocks after having read the corresponding chapter in big Robbin's). I did these in conjunction with the University of Utah webpath questions. I would essentially alternate between these resources after finishing a particular topic during 2nd-year and in the week of study right before exams.
Moving along...
I'll be taking the Step1 this December (at the end of my third year [Australian calendar goes Jan-Nov]). At this point, I've finished ~85% of the USMLE Rx QBank, and path is definitely one of my strongest subjects. I owe that primarily to having read BRS Pathology and having done the RRR and Utah questions (although, yes, I read big Robbin's, I ironically find that that's helped me most with images, not actually with USMLE-style questions themselves). Furthermore, I've flipped back through some of the RRR questions now and they're actually
not that hard conceptually, but they are more difficult in the sense that they rely on you knowing a lot more pathological descriptions and lab values to get them right. For example, they might have a lot of answer choices that will just say "anastamosing sheets of pleomorphic cells entering adjacent stroma," and expect you to know that's infiltrating carcinoma of the breast; the question stems also tend to give you LOTS of lab values without the reference ranges, forcing you to know those too. All in all, if you are <6months from the exam, I would just focus on the QBanks and FA. If you are >6months, explore Utah and RRR. RRR definitely helped me build a strong foundation. In your case, considering you are only eight weeks out, just do QBank Qs and FA.
