Hello everyone,
Good to see so many familiar faces from the step 1 forums, I hope everyone is doing well. Although I feel a bit like a guy who comes into the party a little too fashionably late and realizes all his acquaintances have gone home for the evening already...oh well at least
@dfib slim and I can wait for our scores to come out together.
Sat the test a few days ago. I actually felt like it went pretty well, but that is in large part to the many experience posts I read here that cautioned me to expect that same level of vagueness and taxing judgement questions that you can't quite feel 100% on based on memorized guidelines. I thought it felt very similar to Step 1 in that regard, you just have to sit with the question for a moment, narrow down the choices, go with your best gut feel and move on. Over and over. Don't linger in the ambiguity, pick and keep moving. So we'll see how it actually went I guess, I just thought I'd better put my advice for taking the test in this post since step II apathy is so real when compared to how seriously we all took step 1, and I know I won't remember or care to do any sort of real write up when my scores finally come back (I'll also be in the middle of a brutal rotation).
Study plan.
I took 14 days to prepare for this test. It seemed a bit short when I was trying to plan out my study schedule, but as I alluded to above I had motivation issues going in and honestly I wouldn't have done too much more with any more time. My initial plan was to do a complete second pass through Uworld + incorrects and rewatch all of the onlinemeded videos. That didn't happen. I went through 1/2 of Uworld for my second pass and probably 2/3 of the med ed videos. I keep emphasizing my slacking and failure to live up to my own expectations to reiterate that I don't think people need to kill themselves for this test, or feel guilty about not prepping like they did for step 1. That whole (2 months, 2 weeks, 2 days) saying for steps 1,2, and 3 prep is real, at least in my own experience and most people's that I have talked too (and most study plans I've read on here). The biggest contributor to your grade will be how hard you worked for all your rotations throughout third year and how much you learned from that studying, of which the best metric is probably your shelf scores. I would argue that the step II knowledge base from which they can draw questions is even bigger than step 1, plus they can easily write clinical judgement questions that are impossible to prepare for, so it becomes that much more important to have a SOLID foundation of clinical judgement and a relatively superficial, but broad base of knowledge of all the specialties.
Okay that was a super long winded post, especially for someone who hasn't gotten a score back to speak of. Hopefully I didn't completely f@ck up the real deal and just spread a bunch of misinformation
TLDR
Took test, was hard but not unmanageable.
Resources-
1/2 of Uworld (2nd pass, timed tutor, random)- avg high 80%s
Onlinemeded videos (watched 2/3rd, also a second pass from using them throughout the year).
Scores-
Step 1 was 270+
3rd year shelves- all 90+% raw except for one in the high 80s
NBME 6 (taken completely cold, pre study period about 2.5 weeks out)- 265
NBME 7 (3 days out)- 275
Wanted to take free 120 but was too crunched for time
Took the last 1/2 day off before my test- still highly recommend this as I did for step 1
Real deal- TBD
Good luck everyone. Hope that writeup helps someone at some point.
