Step 1 Pictures: Getting rocked on 'em...

[Helo]

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Hey everyone,

I repeatedly get tripped up on the gross picture associated questions on world and the NBME's, and I was wondering if you tell me a little about how often these gross pictures/pictures in general come up on the exam? I've heard that you can even get some questions with basically just a picture and little else (which I am bound to get wrong). Should I try to look through a gross path source, or thoroughly re-review world pics, etc? Thanks in advance!

 

[alpha06]

You cannot get around these. These are easy points. Just spend some time looking over webpath pictures, the pics in FA, and if you have RR path, they have some excellent pics too. G'L.

 

[lankysudanese]

that is what Robbins qbook is for.

 

[Helo]

Thanks for the advice...I'll flip through the Goljan pics again and try to do as many of the picture based questions from Robbins as I can.

 

[gouda]

It won't take long to flip thru either baby robbins or robbins q book. Looking at the pictures will help reinforce the material so you should just take the time and do it.


The webpath is great too, but it is harder to just flip thru quickly.

 

[DragonWell]

Note on UWorld and pictures:

Don't know how far you are in World or what settings you're using, but there's some debate as to how "random" the questions are in random mode, or if they sort of "progress" through the Qbank. I don't know the answer to this, but I'm just finishing up the last of World and I can say there have been a ton of pictures on my last couple tests - probably something like 20/50. Maybe it's placebo, but it seems like a real jump to me. In any case, there are a lot of good pictures in World once you get to them.

 

[osli]

I wonder about the randomness too sometimes. In ~1000 questions, I've often had two questions follow each other that are closely related, i.e. the second is a progression of the first. Such as one question asking about a diagnostic finding in Alzheimer's and the very next one asking about the mechanism of a common pharmacologic treatment. And it sometimes seems like a set of 50 is heavily weighted in a certain concept that the block is trying to reinforce.

But then again, humans are exceptionally good at finding patterns even where none exist! And our recall bias is legendary.

 

[doc20]

step 1 is not trying to test you on the pictures, the pictures are really there to supplement the question and confirm your answer, if you are not already guessing the answer just from the question stem alone, then you arent really prepared or misreading the stem,

 

[DragonWell]

In one of Goljan's lectures he says about 10% of the picture questions really require you to use the picture.

 

[lankysudanese]

step 1 is not trying to test you on the pictures, the pictures are really there to supplement the question and confirm your answer, if you are not already guessing the answer just from the question stem alone, then you arent really prepared or misreading the stem,

actually, several of the pictures come with a one-sentence question stem. something along the lines of "what is most likely to cause death in this patient" and show a picture of a polycystic kidney. or show a port-wine stain and ask what other organ is commonly affected.

so you should be able to recognize conditions/syndromes from path slides and pictures. the stem won't help you that much in these cases.

 

[Terpskins99]

In one of Goljan's lectures he says about 10% of the picture questions really require you to use the picture.

He's right, but that isn't the point.

If you recognize the image on the exam, you should be able to answer the question without reading most of the passage. It saves time.