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- Mar 15, 2004
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What was your strategy and did you improve on your step 1 score?
I think that doing as many questions is a must. I used USMLE World and thought it helped. Find a good medicine review book, I used Step up to medicine and then used First Aide for the OB/GYN, neuro, peds info.
Use First Aid and USMLE world. Thats it. As someone above said, the biggest mistake people make is using to many resources. If you know those two things (annotate FA with USMLE world) you'll rock the exam.
how do you know your percent or percentile (and don't say its the 2 digit number after the 3 digit one) on step II?
You just have to use the average and standard deviation. 99th %ile should be around the mid 260s.
I asked b/c you technically can't calculate a "percentile" without having a median and quartile ranges...some people just throw that stuff around, especially when they write books "so and so got 99th% on step I and II" when it really can't be confirmed.
When I took the test, the mean was 216 and the sd was 24, and if you assume a normal distribution about the mean then 2.5% of people would be above a 264 and the top 1% are probably in the high 260s to low 270s. This is statistically presumptive, not definitive.
Point taken. It's definitely presumptive, although with so many people taking the test you'd think that the distribution of scores would be fairly normalized and thus the mean and SD could be used to estimate a somewhat accurate 99th percentile. That's what I meant by "around" the mid 260s. If people got around that score I think it's fair to say you have a 99th percentile score.
The problem is really people (and PD's!!!!) that throw around the 99th percentile talk when they are really talking about the 2 digit score. Different situation there.
agreed...it's strange that people do that when it explicitly says on the NBME website under USMLE FAQs that the 2 digit is NOT a percentile. I think that it's even in italics or highlighted in some way.
How did you feel walking out of the door? ie, did you feel extremely confident that you at least passed? Just curious. Waiting on step 1 scores.I read Kaplan Notes during my rotations and always did question from USMLE WORLD during my rotations. I took 3 weeks to study for the real exam and did all USMLE WORLD most of it for the second time and read the explanations. I also read all Kaplan notes during these 3 weeks, I was reading the notes and then doing the question for that subject, but I really used the question as a main study guide not as a measure of how well I'd score on the actual test...Here's some of the numbers
USMLE WORLD (1ST TIME)= 73-74%
USMLE WORLD (2ND TIME A FEW MONTHS LATER) =84%
READ KAPLAN NOTES TWICE FOR ALMOST EVERY SUBJECT..
Note: If you'd ask me FA which I used fairly infrequently seems to be the best review book. I did used CRUSH THE STEP 2 for derm/ophth/ent.
Best advice I can give you is to use USMLE WORLD explanations as your study guide their explanations are awesome ..then choose any review book you want; I chose KAPLAN NOTES which seems overwhelming butan excellent source.
ACTUAL EXAM=99%
Yes, I improved a few points from STEP 1.
I hope it helps. Feel free to IM if you need to.
Good luck to you all...