I found this thread to be helpful, so I wanted to give back...
US American medical gradate, two months into my preliminary internal medicine year (I prefered to stay where I graduated from medical school for my intern year rather than taking a cushier TY) and headed into the beautiful field of Radiation Oncology in 10 months
Like some of the previous posters, I thought that the MCQ portion of the exam was very difficult, and in some circumstances, unfair. I am pretty good at objectively looking at exams and being able to assess the number of good questions vs. bad questions. I found both Step 1 and Step 2 to have a large majority of questions where there was only one correct answer. It seemed like on this exam that you could narrow it down to 2 answers, but once you got to that point you could either make a case for either answer or not enough information was present to answer the question fully. So, in a sense, I thought there were a lot of questions that were not able to accurately assess your knowledge/thought process, but were kind of "B.S." questions. As one previous poster mentioned, I don't know how much more it would have helped if I had studied more. Furthermore, the vignettes were incredibly long and time consuming. On Step 1 and Step 2, I finished nearly every block with 5-10 minutes to spare. On Step 3, I used almost the entire alloted time for every block so don't feel frustrated/disappointed if you are in a similar situation.
That being said about the MCQ portion of the exam, I thought that the CCS cases were very straight forward and very fair. I finished the second day at 1:30 or so, as compared to taking the full eight hours on day one. The second day was a breeze compared to the first day, so be prepared for a rough first day with
LONG vignettes.
USMLE World MCQ: 82% complete, 61% correct.
USMLE World CCS: I went through the CCS cases twice/each, though I merely read the explanations both times b/c I didn't think that it was very efficient use of time to actually work through each case. In retrospect, you could probably do without buying the USMLE World CCS and just familiarize yourself with the software on the USMLE website.
Books/other resources: None. I am sure that they would be helpful, but I simply didn't have the motivation to do anything more than questions.
Step 1: 238
Step 2: 252
Step 3: ? (will report back in three weeks)