Time Management, please help
Started by Saman49
If english is not your first language, then Step 2 and Step 3 are more intimidating because they have longer passages / questions.
Try Reading the question stem 1st, scan the answers, and frame an idea of what topic the question is testing - this should take no more than 10 seconds, and can often provide a strategic perspective when reading the passage.
Do they want treatment? next best step? test or diagnostics? Diagnosis of illness? mechanism of disease? most likely outcome? is this a Psych Q? OB? Peds? is it an Emergency?
After that, read the question at the fastest pace you can understand - it is not necessary to read every single word. As you keep doing questions, learn to be fast at picking out the important details 1st such as Age / Sex, pertinent PMHx / Social hx, important Positive and Negative symptoms or exam findings, risk factors, Vitals / Labs...
Getting hung up on trying to read and highlight in too much detail is a common time sink.
Picking between two answers is another common time sink.
However, carelessness and glossing over a fine point in the passage is also a common way people miss questions. So, it is important to steadily develop and refine the balance between reading quickly vs effectively and efficiently.
The bottom line - the more questions you do under time, the better you will get.
Took the exam yesterday. Trust me I had the same issue. First block wasn't that bad but when fatigue hits you it's so much harder to go through the questions fast and proficiently. I always seem to spend the most of my time debating on an answer choice and reading every word to see if they are trying to pull a fast one on me lol but yeah find a way because I literally ended up doing like 4 questions in 2 minutes and the biostats and drug ad ones forget about it. They always screwd me over by having them have 3 questions each and towards the end of each block I literally just clicked and kept it going no way I was going to figure that out by reading the most dry content ever. Literally you can tell from some of the questions that they were made to distract you on time with the biostats especially when it came to doing math.
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