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So I took Step 2CK yesterday. Just wanted to give my impressions to my fellow students having to go through this horrible experience. I'm a pretty solid student with a solid but not ridiculous Step 1 score (96). Felt a little rattled by this one.
For prep: completed UW, read Secrets, B&W, did Kaplan Qbook, some other random readings and reviews and re-started UW doing random blocks again. By the end was scoring in the high 70's consistently. Did all 3 NBME's with wildy different results from 204 at the beginning to 240 at the end).
The individual test questions seemed pretty manageable.Not one of them seemed so ridiculously hard or anything. What made this test hard was the stamina it required .By block 4 I was beginning to feel like I was reading a foreign language. Lab values I easily interpreted an hour before started to make no sense. By block 5 I felt like giving up and started to just pop in my first choice and quickly move on. Some blocks I finished with 10 minutes to spare, some I finished w 2. In some cases I went back to recheck answers, some I didn't. I don't recommend re-checking too heavily bc you start to play mind games with yourself and second guess. I switched a lot of my responses in my checking and regrettably found out later I switched from right to wrong. Damn! The test center peeved me off bc they said no ear plugs. Well I don't know about you guys but the test center I traditionally use is not quiet. The proctors walk around to check on you every five minutes, and while they were sitting in the viewing area they were constantly talking. I told them about this distraction and they said, Yeah, we get the request to keep down all the time and we realize that it can become a problem but we like to determine the need for decreasing our voices and will when we feel it's appropriate! Let's also not forget about the girl behind me furiously typing away for some other test. We need to band together and tell the USMLE that using earplugs does not constitute cheating, esp if they are checked out by staff! THat's bs.
Anyway, back to the test. I felt like UW was the best preparation for the pace of the test. The question stems were equally diverse. Some long, but never too long, some very short. They were definitely manageable. I was surprised by the content too. Some of the questions were almost exactly like a few I did on UW. Same concepts, similar wording. Overall though, I felt kind of blindsided by the randomness of the questions I got. A lot of the ones I remember were things that I never really heard of or concepts that were rare and not emphasized in school, readings or review materials. You have to be extremely well read to conquer this beast, and let's face it, that would take years. The best prep is studying hard for shelf exams I think and doing UW. I might be wrong but I feel like it's not a really great judgement of our capabilities as doctors. If they really wanted to know if we knew enough to practice medicine with supervision, then they'd ask us stuff that was more relevant than not. I don't know how much being able to hurry up and answer ridiculous questions in a minute or less for eight hours straight really reflects our abilities to make good decisions as doctors. Yeah, yeah, i know you need to be able to make snap decisions and what not, but this is just truly a painful hoop to jump through to get to that. SO overall, my advice is IM, Peds, OBGyn, fair share of derm stuff, very basic psych questions, 2 video questions at the end of the block, very little surgery. Be ready for random stuff, but don't get thrown off by it. I probably just remember them bc you always remember the stuff you have no clue about. Good luck to everybody, it's a unique beast to conquer.
For prep: completed UW, read Secrets, B&W, did Kaplan Qbook, some other random readings and reviews and re-started UW doing random blocks again. By the end was scoring in the high 70's consistently. Did all 3 NBME's with wildy different results from 204 at the beginning to 240 at the end).
The individual test questions seemed pretty manageable.Not one of them seemed so ridiculously hard or anything. What made this test hard was the stamina it required .By block 4 I was beginning to feel like I was reading a foreign language. Lab values I easily interpreted an hour before started to make no sense. By block 5 I felt like giving up and started to just pop in my first choice and quickly move on. Some blocks I finished with 10 minutes to spare, some I finished w 2. In some cases I went back to recheck answers, some I didn't. I don't recommend re-checking too heavily bc you start to play mind games with yourself and second guess. I switched a lot of my responses in my checking and regrettably found out later I switched from right to wrong. Damn! The test center peeved me off bc they said no ear plugs. Well I don't know about you guys but the test center I traditionally use is not quiet. The proctors walk around to check on you every five minutes, and while they were sitting in the viewing area they were constantly talking. I told them about this distraction and they said, Yeah, we get the request to keep down all the time and we realize that it can become a problem but we like to determine the need for decreasing our voices and will when we feel it's appropriate! Let's also not forget about the girl behind me furiously typing away for some other test. We need to band together and tell the USMLE that using earplugs does not constitute cheating, esp if they are checked out by staff! THat's bs.
Anyway, back to the test. I felt like UW was the best preparation for the pace of the test. The question stems were equally diverse. Some long, but never too long, some very short. They were definitely manageable. I was surprised by the content too. Some of the questions were almost exactly like a few I did on UW. Same concepts, similar wording. Overall though, I felt kind of blindsided by the randomness of the questions I got. A lot of the ones I remember were things that I never really heard of or concepts that were rare and not emphasized in school, readings or review materials. You have to be extremely well read to conquer this beast, and let's face it, that would take years. The best prep is studying hard for shelf exams I think and doing UW. I might be wrong but I feel like it's not a really great judgement of our capabilities as doctors. If they really wanted to know if we knew enough to practice medicine with supervision, then they'd ask us stuff that was more relevant than not. I don't know how much being able to hurry up and answer ridiculous questions in a minute or less for eight hours straight really reflects our abilities to make good decisions as doctors. Yeah, yeah, i know you need to be able to make snap decisions and what not, but this is just truly a painful hoop to jump through to get to that. SO overall, my advice is IM, Peds, OBGyn, fair share of derm stuff, very basic psych questions, 2 video questions at the end of the block, very little surgery. Be ready for random stuff, but don't get thrown off by it. I probably just remember them bc you always remember the stuff you have no clue about. Good luck to everybody, it's a unique beast to conquer.
?!?! I hope this is a test-center specific thing because I need those big time...I remember being able to use them during step I...not good.
