Step 3

[Surfer75]

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What books do you guys suggest?

 

[frog4brooke]

Yikes-Where'd everybody go?

I would like to hear a little about this, too . . .

 

[njbmd]

Hi there,
I used Swanson's Review for Family Practice. Worked great and easy to get through for a tired general surgery resident. Step III is painfully easy just tedious to read the scenarios.

njbmd 😀

 

[gilbertfletcher]

as you probably know, step 3 consists of two days:

day 1--8 blocks of 45-50 questions, which are separated by clinical environment (i.e. outpatient, inpatient, emergency room). I thought some of the questions were kind of vague, but mostly straight forward. I felt most of the questions dealt with internal medicine (>75%).

day 2--3 or 4 more MCQ type blocks of 35-40 questions followed by 9 clinical case scenarios. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the software and the types of orders you can and can not execute. Don't forget that you can order preventative type care (e.g. "advise against smoking")

I'm currently in the middle of a pretty rigorous internal medicine preliminary year. I took my step 3 at the beginning of november during an elective month. I basically studied 3-4 hours a night for 2 weeks, and went over the USMLE step 3 cd CCS twice. I read Crush Step 3 twice, focusing on peds, ob, psych and biostats (i felt pretty comfortable with medicine topics), and answered all 1000 Kaplan q bank questions. I practiced the questions in 50 question blocks so i could get used to the format.

don't sweat step 3. i passed comfortably (above average), and probably could've taken it cold and still passed (i'm not being cocky, just giving an idea of how reasonable it is).

I had no idea of how I had fared after taking the exam; just exhausted from the two days.

fyi, I got the exact same score on step 3 as i did on step 1.

good luck.

 

[frog4brooke]

Thanks a lot!

What do you guys think about trying to take Step 3 as early as possible during residency? Some people have said that this is the way to go-What do you think?

Thanks,
B

 

[Sessamoid]

If you did well on the first two steps, don't sweat the 3rd. If you're in a generalist field, you probably shouldn't even bother studying for it. I didn't study at all (didn't even bother sharpening my pencils until I got to the test site) and still scored over the 90th percentile. The guys that have to sweat it are those in pretty specific specialties that limit the type and range of people and pathology that they see (ophthalmology, anesthesia, ob/gyn, etc). Most of the gen surgery residents I knew had no problem at all since they have to know a fair amount of medicine in their field as well, and they see patients of all types.

Step 1: 2 months
Step 2: 2 weeks
Step 3: 2 #2 pencils