So I just received my score not too long ago and because this thread has helped me so much I wanted to extend my study plan as to how I tackled the USMLE Step 2 CK.
I had 4 weeks to study for this exam (I was just coming off of my surgery rotation, so the first week was kind of shot)...Also, background I honored little over half of my 3rd year clerkships so had a somewhat solid foundation going into USMLE Step 2 CK prep.
Anyway my initial plan was to do DIT (I had success with it for USMLE Step 1, so I said what the hell let me try it again...). Long story short I did not feel like this had enough umph for USMLE Step 2 CK. Either it seemed to basic or I thought the text they went thru was super dry. So I scrapped it and started drafting other options:
Let me pause right here and tell you what really helps... QUESTIONS QUESTIONS QUESTIONS.... I want to echo everyone else when I say that Uworld is a very good resource and I went thru it once throughout the year, and twice during my dedicated study time with my incorrects x 2. Again I am not the most phenomenal test taker so I need the repetition. How did I utilize this resource to its potential?
I made notes on the notes feature of UWorld (this is a very good feature!) as soon as you are done reviewing a block and typing notes on each question, you can generate a PDF of notes from UWORLD which gives you each question number, and everything organized by subject (OB, Psych, Peds, etc.).
This helps a lot because #1 you are not wasting time annotating and #2 UW is doing all the organization by subject and giving you the question number so you can refer to an algorithm again. I consolidated the whole question bank into 30 pages.
What other question sources did I use?
1. Kaplan (I had this idealistic plan that I was going to finish this bank as well, I probably did 40% of it just to get more practice).
2. NBME Subject exams. Remember those practice tests you took before the shelfs? I decided to do them all again, yes this was not conducive to the wallet, but more questions and concepts the better. I took notes on each one as I used the extended time feature which gave me 4 hours to do it (again remember these are all learning tools and not assessment). The lame thing is that there are no answers given, but you can look them up. So again that is 100 questions per subject!
3. NBME Clinical Science exams (essentially practice USMLE Step 2 CK NBMEs): I took all of them and the UWSA
4: 272 (idk how I did this but I missed nine questions, this was my first assessment and I was shocked!).
6: 258 (okay a little bit back to reality...)
7: 229 (**** myself one week before...I knew it was hard going into it from reading on SDN)
UWSA: 235
I made sure that I did not let any of these score fluctuations affect me mentally, I kept focus and now kept organizing and reviewing my notes for UW.
Concurrently here is also what I did for studying:
1. Top Shelf Internal Medicine Course (essentially goes thru Master the Boards Internal Medicine). I used this for my IM shelf so I did the whole course again. I thought this was so helpful as I became more confident about the material, IM being a huge part of the test.
2. Online Med Ed, I did all the subjects that were not IM. These videos are short organized and amazing for the test. It gave me a structured way to review all of the material. I used the notes concurrently.
3. MTB Step 3 Peds and OBGYN. I kept reading that MTB Step 3 would be helpful so I went ahead and did it for these subjects. I think it was an adjunct that helped everything.
Let me know if you guys want my test experience, but all in all test day was long. Questions were hard. I went thru everything with 3-5 minutes per block to review.
FINAL SCORE:
253 🙂
Hope this helps and contact me with any questions!
