Congrats, can you share your preparation strategy and exam experience?
sure
i went thru uworld bank in tutor mode once and flagged over half the bank on questions i didn't feel I strongly understood or concepts i thought were high yield and worth revisiting. Then i randomly redid the questions I either flagged for those reasons or got wrong on my first pass. So all together I did the bank somewhere between 1.5 - 2x times. I also read once through the MTB step 3 book by Conrad Fischer, which I found very helpful to review the bread and butter basics in the areas of medicine that I havent seen since third year of med school.
For CCS I went through about half of the interactive cases on uworld that I randomly selected. I also read about half the non-interactive cases, including their scoring rubrics, that are in uworld, again randomly selected. I didnt have time to go thru all of them because I naively opened this only 5-7 days before the test. I found these cases helpful to learn the format and learn a rough way to approach the cases and get the easy points. However, I was very intimidated by how much detail the scoring criteria on uworld included. I was especially intimidated by some of the more advanced level cases in fields I am not as familiar with. I would say that CCS is what I was most worried about going into the exam.
I went through the biostats course on uworld twice.
I took UWSA 1 and 2 one day apart from each other and this was approx 9-10 days before I actually took the exam. I actually found that these two forms were discrepant in predicting my score. I think form 1 predicted 215 and form 2 predicted 238.
I studied over the course of about 2 months while doing intern year rotations, including inpatient ones, and also during a block of my vacation time. In my program that is approx 2 weeks. In retrospect I wish I did not do this. But the fact is I get extremely anxious about standardized exams and always feel unprepared for them. I therefore made a personal choice to do that.
Anyway , i took the exam on 2 consecutive days. I found the biostats questions to be very manageable and felt well prepared for them. The ethical questions were very straightforward. I found clinical questions to be very challenging and saw several topics I did not remember seeing at all in uworld. I flagged about half the questions on all the blocks. The CCS cases I found to be very manageable for the most part and less complex than uworld led me to expect. All except 2-3 ended early and I got to the diagnosis and major management orders in most of them. There was one pediatrics case I initially thought would be straightforward but I turned into a million dollar huge workup that was negative and so I didn't get the diagnosis and the patient's status never advanced or changed before time ran out. Besides that case I felt like i had hit the high notes in the others.
I scored 245, which is 90th percentile based on last year's data. I had just finished PGY1 in a university IM residency when I took step 3. Step 1 score was 88th percentile and step 2 was 85th percentile. Im of course very happy with the score but would be just as happy with an average score. I think I likely stressed too much over this exam but that is naturally just how I am.
anyway, TLDR:
-no matter how much you study you will still see a good chunk of WTF questions
-UWSA forms are not always predictive
-CCS is a lot less complex than in uworld
-biostats questions very similar to uworld
-MTB for Step 3 good for reviewing material in subjects you're less familiar with
