My thoughts exactly. I felt like I was taking a bunch of UW blocks again. Stems weren't THAT much longer. Practice speed reading and sifting through info quickly during prep (i.e. 3rd year shelf review) and longer stems shouldn't be too much of an issue.
I didn't have shelf exams while studying abroad and so I've been doing many 3rd year shelf questions (e.g. mksap, pretest, lange, mastery/nbme forms) alongside UW that were recommended by the members here and through the clinical rotations forum for that practice.
The stems are not as unfamiliar as before now with all the questions and explanations I am doing but I am very sure I can augment my test strategy better with a few more adjustments. I've picked up on many silly mistakes of misreading things when getting the questions wrong and that's been very helpful in finding out things to try and not replicate.
I've been trying different ways of doing practice questions and still haven't found the best groove on handling the very long stems
What are your thoughts on these situations :
On shorter questions, I'll try reading from the first sentence all the way to the end and final question, then look for the answer.
On the longer ones, I'll read the last sentence/question and then go to the top and continue as I would on the shorter stem approach. I've found that sometimes I forget what the question was while reading through the longer question though. Or sometimes, forget what the first few sentences of the question was.
On question items with more than 5-6 choices and a long stem, I pray and look at the last question sentence, find an answer to consider, and then go to the first sentence through in case I missed something and finally select/confirm the answer.
The other thing is trying to figure out how not to do a double take or double read the question in where now, it's more than 70-90 seconds or more. When it comes to questions with very long stems or have a long list of labs, that's another thing on where that part should be integrated.
I read some experiences here where some would look at the last question/sentence, glance at the answers to frame the mind and then go to the top and all the way through. They say, you should already have an answer before even looking at the answer but that doesn't always seem the case.
In the end, I've had to use the ruling out of answers knowing that X, Y, Z are wrong and that helps a bit. I also tried playing with the highlighting feature but found that to be a bit more time consuming and distracting. I took a practice exam at prometric the other day and noticed a lot of people taking the steps, using the highlight feature though when I was taking a break. Is that a common thing a lot of people do?
There were some good recommendations here of marking long vignettes also, put an answer and go back to it after to not lose time on other questions. Maybe mark and leave blank the 2-3 locked sequential answers to save near the end to not get demoralized in case you find you answer it wrong when seeing the next sequence where they state or hint to that previous answer.
Seems drug ads are also easy points not to miss and something to put a better strategy on also.
