You're gonna get different pieces of advice from folks here. Ideally I tell the people I tutor to divide prep into 3 stages: content review, QB practice questions, and FL practice exams.
Content review:
- I do recommend Anki if that's your thing but fine if it's not. I'd say try to get the majority of content review done PRIOR to dedicated.
- Go over the classics BnB, 1 pass through Sketchy (micro and pharm), Pathoma (ch.1-5/6 esp), FA (for weak areas), Divine Interventions Podcast
- Take notes, edit, and review them periodically until your exam
- Don't fall into the trap of wasting too much time on this phase - practice questions are where gold is fold
QB practice:
- The lions share of your time should be spent doing practice questions
- UW is the gold standard (AMBOSS is great if you need more practice questions)
- If you have access to the AMBOSS Medical Library its a fantastic tool for helping clarify weaknesses
- Have a study theme for each day of the week. I actually recommend picking 1-2 systems (e.g. biochem+genetics) and then selecting all subjects within those and doing anywhere from 20-40 questions each day. Then take the afternoon to brush up on weak points discovered that day. This makes your reviews way more efficient than doing random blocks of questions. I do usually have students pick 1 day of the week (e.g Friday or Saturday) where they do random blocks covering all the subjects studied that week.
- During dedicated, I would do 1-3 blocks of 40q each day. It sucks but it's your career on the line. The better you build your foundation, the stronger you go into M3, the stronger you go into step 2, the better you score on it and the more options you have during residency applications
- I did all my UW blocks on untimed, tutor mode - keeps your reviews fresh w/ your thinking
Practice exams:
- If you time your studying, you can be a couple hundred questions into UW going into your dedicated (I advice aiming to go through about 50-70% of UW before sitting for the exam)
- Take a practice exam at the beginning of dedicated. I know AMBOSS offers one in Feb each year that gives you a score. But any NBME will suffice and should give you a benchmark of your efforts.
- In the pass/fail era, aiming for scores of >70% or 3-digit scores over 210 will put you in the passing range comfortably (NBME says 99% chance of passing w/i a week of that practice exam)
- I'm an advocate of weekly practice exams under exam conditions (timed, non-tutor mode). This test sucks but you can build stamina towards it. I've done it from the MCAT (scored in the 95th percentile), Step 1 (scored in 90th percentile), Step 2 (scored in 99th percentile)
Your mileage may vary but this is the framework I advice to start. Edit as need be. Best of luck!
