To those of you who recently took the Step 1 exam, I have a question for you. Exactly what parts did you stress on the most in you FA book? I have to admit, the Path section in FA is garbage, instead I'm using BRS Path. I find the strongest sections to be Pharm, Phsyio (with annotated notes from BRS Physio), Micro (with annotated notes from CMMRS), Behavioral, & Biochemistry (with annotated notes from BRS Behavioral and Lippincott's & RR Biochem, respectively) and the Anatomies. But I find myself totally skipping the Path section except for the glossy pictures. Should I not do this and focus on the Path section in FA also? In addition to this, how useful is the Rapid Review section and the MC association section of FA? Did any one bother with this end section?
Thanks in advance for everyones post.
Best wishes to everyone.
You are right...the path section isn't the greatest in FA but in terms of condensing everything its great..so my suggestion is that if you have a few months ahead of you then I would focus on BRS path but also go over FA path so that the week before the test you can go through FA and be familiar w/ the content already.....
Anatomy in FA was good if you got those regurg. type of questions..but most of my anatomy questions were very clinical....for instance: pt had an injury while performing or being in a certain kind of action and then what kind of clinical manifestation would you expect or what is the injury given the clinical manifestation....FA didn't help much with those questions but thankfully I had read "Road to USMLE anatomy" which was a great book and I would highly recommend getting it and only reading the "clinical correlat" stuff.
As far as rapid review and the MC association section....i never looked at it until the morning of and it really didn't help much...but I had an hour drive to my test center so I figured i might as well... the sections I thought were the greatest: PHARM, MICRO,BIOCHEM....PHYSIO was questionable in FA for me...
Weakest: PATH (I used Goljen coz I had used BRS thruout med school..since I go to CMS and the authors of BRS are our path professors so our tests were verbatim from brs)
Intermediate: ANATOMY (I did road to usmle anatomy), BEHAVIORAL (I used kaplan's behavioral...and thought it was awesome with its rules and what not)
Hope this helps....
G'luck 🙂
