Saving prep questions for closer to boards?

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sliceofbread136

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I’ve always liked to do my questions closer to a big test, but I’ve got a month of sitting around and should probably start some board practice.

I always here prep questions are best but I don’t want to use them all up and then have none to do when I get closer to October. Should I try a different question pool?

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I Did Medstudy questions and found them very similar to the actual exam. PREP good to build knowledge but does not represent the actual exam. Do PREP now, then Medstudy closer to the exam.
 
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Right now you may only have access to a few years of PREP, but by asking around you can likely find more. Your program and recently graduated residents may have past copies they can lend you. I was able to complete three additional years of PREP questions (beyond what I had access to online) using this method. I did the older versions first and the saved the others for closer to the exam.
 
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I Did Medstudy questions and found them very similar to the actual exam. PREP good to build knowledge but does not represent the actual exam. Do PREP now, then Medstudy closer to the exam.

thabks man I’ll look into it
 
When does your PREP access end? Mine ends in June so I'm doing all of those before starting MedStudy in July.
 
When does your PREP access end? Mine ends in June so I'm doing all of those before starting MedStudy in July.
Are you sure? You should have 2 years of online access to each self-assessment. So PREP 2018 should be accessible to you until 12/31/20, PREP 2019 until 12/31/21, etc.
 
But if you don't have an active AAP membership anymore, I don't think you can access PREP.
Good point. AAP membership is only $140 for fellowship trainees and not that much more for candidate members with the 50% discount your first year. Many people have CME money to pay for it. Others may feel differently, but I felt it was well worth the cost to be able to access PREP right up to my exam date.
 
Yes, I'm sure. My AAP membership is only paid through 7/1 by my program, so I no longer have access after June. I'm not paying for anything I don't have to, as I am moving for fellowship in one of the most expensive cities in the US. I believe my fellowship program is only paying for NeoPREP starting in July... haven't gotten full details yet. I've been working diligently through PREP the past few weeks, so I don't have much left to go before I finish all three years currently available to me.
 
Yes, I'm sure. My AAP membership is only paid through 7/1 by my program, so I no longer have access after June. I'm not paying for anything I don't have to, as I am moving for fellowship in one of the most expensive cities in the US. I believe my fellowship program is only paying for NeoPREP starting in July... haven't gotten full details yet. I've been working diligently through PREP the past few weeks, so I don't have much left to go before I finish all three years currently available to me.

If they're buying NeoPREP, they should just get you a membership--fellow members get access to the past three years of a subspecialty PREP for free. And if you get a membership, you should still have access to your PREP from residency. I *think* that is the case even if your membership lapses for a couple weeks.
 
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If they're buying NeoPREP, they should just get you a membership--fellow members get access to the past three years of a subspecialty PREP for free. And if you get a membership, you should still have access to your PREP from residency. I *think* that is the case even if your membership lapses for a couple weeks.
I can confirm that. I had about a 2 week lapse from residency to fellowship and still had access to PREP up to my exam and beyond.
 
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Good to know; thanks, guys! I'm still finishing all of my PREP questions this week and then moving to MedStudy.
 
At bare minimum, you should do all of the questions that you have access to at least once, and then go back and do all the ones you got wrong again.

Really, I recommend doing all of the questions twice, no matter what. There is always more to learn from each question, and doing each one twice definitely won't make you dumber.

Personally, I prefer the MedStudy Q-bank - it is excellent. But there is also a lot of learning in the PREP questions, if you have the time/energy to do them the right way (actually reading and understanding the answer explanations, and committing the "PREP pearls" to memory).
 
My plan is to get my available PREP questions done as soon as I can, then hit up MedStudy videos and LYW, then MedStudy qbank. I might save one year of PREP to the end so I can focus on areas of weakness identified in the first few PREP years, just to make sure I gave addressed those weak areas in with the MedStudy videos and LYW. Does this seem like a good plan?

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I'd argue that if done properly, there's little need to "save" questions, because you'll actually spend more time per session than a simple practice test.

Most people go through questions, see if they got the answer correct and move on, or if they're a little more in depth, will look at why the right answer is right. I'm guilty as charged on going through my MOCA Peds questions this way.

What i would suggest is to turn off the timer for questions, and as you are going through questions stems and answer choices, write out why each choice is wrong or right, then check your work and determine if your initial logic matches up with the question explanation. This provides you with 4x as many data points to review, and in essence you are checking your work to find out not only were you thinking about the question stem correctly, but did you understand why the wrong answers were wrong for the correct reasons. If you correctly identified that an answer choice was wrong, but didn't understand why, then you go back and review that topic until it makes sense. That is all far more time consuming and you'll end up using far fewer questions per study session, get more out of the session overall, and subsequently score better on test day.

Alternatively, there were some sessions that I ignored the question stems completely and simply wrote down everything I knew about each answer choice, then looked up details about each option to see how much or how little I actually knew (or thought I knew), and then corrected what I got wrong in my diatribe to myself. This method ends up not "using up" any questions at all, as you're not even looking at the question, just using it as a starting point.
 
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