Step 3 Importance

[It's opHthalmology]

Hi guys,

Studying for Step 3 in intern year at the moment. Obviously you want to do well in whatever test you take. But just how important is it to score really well in Step 3 in comparison to your other steps? Does it look bad if your Step 3 is around 220 and your other steps were around 240s?

What about for fellowships?

Thanks

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[Hanky]

All of us struggled with that question at one point or another. Step 3 is unanimously agreed to be the least important part of the fellowship application. But it doesn't mean that nobody will care about a significant drop (though it seems that 90% of people won't care even if you dropped down to a 200). If it ever matters, it would only matter for fellowship.

 

[CookieMonster55]

It seemed to be very unimportant for fellowship application. Of course they look at your whole application, so you never want anything that is going to embarrass you during the process, but I doubt if you've done well so far and have engaged yourself in your clinical rotations during intern year that you won't do well. I would recommend following the "80/20 rule" with this, meaning that you can probably find a way to efficiently study with about 20% of the time/effort you studied for Step 1 and get 80% of the benefit (probably just do practice questions for a week or two and nothing else). This should be enough to have a score high enough to not get any attention. A very high Step 3 score will almost certainly make no difference in your fellowship match result, so don't go overboard.