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Took it yesterday and wanted to give some of my thoughts.
Talk a bit about content first. Overall, pretty balanced. I'd say the majority of it was pathology/physiology as expected. It seemed like there wasn't hardly any biochem/metabolism questions at all, maybe 10-20 at most. Like others have said, though, I thought there was a good bit more cell/molec than maybe should have been. If you know your pharm, you should be able to get most of the pharm questions.. I don't remember too many toxicity type questions, and the ones I do remember were autonomic drugs so fairly easy. I did seem to have 4-5 questions dealing with psych/seizure drugs, though, which wasn't fun. Not much embryology and maybe 1 or 2 biostat questions. Behavior was pretty easy. Surprisingly, I did seem to have 3-4 questions dealing with "stats" e.g. prevalence of certain diseases, etc. which kind of sucked. Everything else was spread pretty evenly. Heavy hitters on my form seemed to be path/phys and cell/molec.
Next, question structure. I thought the test was extremely general, extremely vague at times. Most path/phys questions were 2,3 step questions. There weren't that many "what is the likely diagnosis" type questions. And the very rare times that there were these questions, they were very vague in describing the symptoms, used probably the least common symptoms of a disease, so that you were left kind of guessing what exactly they were describing. There were of course your usual WTF? questions as well (I'm hoping these were the "experimental" questions). I'd say maybe 1/4-1/3 of the questions were pretty straightforward. Overall, though, I think the majority of the questions were critical thinking, multiple step questions; which is why I think so many people really don't know if they did well or not, b/c the answers aren't really black and white. How well you do kind of depends on how good you were at reasoning through the answers. Honestly, I'd say this test focused a whole lot on your knowledge of basic, general pathology rather than just specific diseases. Much of the time, I felt like I was being tested on my 1st year knowledge rather than 2nd.
In retrospect, what would I do different?? First off, QBank pretty much proved to be worthless. In fact, I think it maybe ended up hurting me. It may be a good learning tool, but it DOES NOT prepare you for the real thing. It forces you to focus your studies on way too many details and may cause you to "lose sight of the forest because of all the trees." If I had it to do again, I honestly don't know if I'd use QBank b/c it may do more harm than good. The NBME forms are so much closer to the real thing (in fact, I had 3-4 questions that were the same questions stems verbatim from the NBME, just asking different questions). So I would definitely spend some time studying the big picture, making sure you have a good grasp on general pathology concepts. And of course, I'd spend a little more time with cell/molec.
So I honestly have no idea what to expect regarding my score. According to QBank (77% average on last 8 random sets), I should make 245+, but I have little doubt that my score will be much closer to my 211, 204 that I made on the NBME tests. Honestly, the way I feel right now, I'll be happy just to pass, thrilled if I break 200, and ecstatic if I score above average.
That's all I can think of right now, I'll add anything else if it comes to mind. I'll be around all day before leaving town tommorrow if anyone wants to ask anything....
Talk a bit about content first. Overall, pretty balanced. I'd say the majority of it was pathology/physiology as expected. It seemed like there wasn't hardly any biochem/metabolism questions at all, maybe 10-20 at most. Like others have said, though, I thought there was a good bit more cell/molec than maybe should have been. If you know your pharm, you should be able to get most of the pharm questions.. I don't remember too many toxicity type questions, and the ones I do remember were autonomic drugs so fairly easy. I did seem to have 4-5 questions dealing with psych/seizure drugs, though, which wasn't fun. Not much embryology and maybe 1 or 2 biostat questions. Behavior was pretty easy. Surprisingly, I did seem to have 3-4 questions dealing with "stats" e.g. prevalence of certain diseases, etc. which kind of sucked. Everything else was spread pretty evenly. Heavy hitters on my form seemed to be path/phys and cell/molec.
Next, question structure. I thought the test was extremely general, extremely vague at times. Most path/phys questions were 2,3 step questions. There weren't that many "what is the likely diagnosis" type questions. And the very rare times that there were these questions, they were very vague in describing the symptoms, used probably the least common symptoms of a disease, so that you were left kind of guessing what exactly they were describing. There were of course your usual WTF? questions as well (I'm hoping these were the "experimental" questions). I'd say maybe 1/4-1/3 of the questions were pretty straightforward. Overall, though, I think the majority of the questions were critical thinking, multiple step questions; which is why I think so many people really don't know if they did well or not, b/c the answers aren't really black and white. How well you do kind of depends on how good you were at reasoning through the answers. Honestly, I'd say this test focused a whole lot on your knowledge of basic, general pathology rather than just specific diseases. Much of the time, I felt like I was being tested on my 1st year knowledge rather than 2nd.
In retrospect, what would I do different?? First off, QBank pretty much proved to be worthless. In fact, I think it maybe ended up hurting me. It may be a good learning tool, but it DOES NOT prepare you for the real thing. It forces you to focus your studies on way too many details and may cause you to "lose sight of the forest because of all the trees." If I had it to do again, I honestly don't know if I'd use QBank b/c it may do more harm than good. The NBME forms are so much closer to the real thing (in fact, I had 3-4 questions that were the same questions stems verbatim from the NBME, just asking different questions). So I would definitely spend some time studying the big picture, making sure you have a good grasp on general pathology concepts. And of course, I'd spend a little more time with cell/molec.
So I honestly have no idea what to expect regarding my score. According to QBank (77% average on last 8 random sets), I should make 245+, but I have little doubt that my score will be much closer to my 211, 204 that I made on the NBME tests. Honestly, the way I feel right now, I'll be happy just to pass, thrilled if I break 200, and ecstatic if I score above average.
That's all I can think of right now, I'll add anything else if it comes to mind. I'll be around all day before leaving town tommorrow if anyone wants to ask anything....
