UW incorrect or new qbank?

[OOllie]

---

Members don't see this ad.

I just finished uworld today, and wondering if its better to get a new qbank (kaplan or usmlerx), or go through my UW incorrect first?

 

[fahimaz7]

What was your %? I plan on going back through uworld, as there are plenty of questions that I didn't know, or I got them right b/c of luck/narrowing it down.

 

[ScubaStarved]

I just finished uworld today, and wondering if its better to get a new qbank (kaplan or usmlerx), or go through my UW incorrect first?

Incorrects are incredibly useful. Pay special attention to the ones not in FA, as they have been added based on people's testing experiences. Proceed like so: make and suspend tests with all your marked questions, make and suspend tests with all your incorrect questions, complete all of those tests, then repeat. Because UWorld's randomization feature is so poor, this will give you the broadest exposure to the topics that are most foreign to you.

That said, if you have another month+, Qbank is good for a select few subjects (biochem enzyme disorders, stats, behavior) if you can look past the clunky interface, low res pictures, constant window resizing requiring a restart, some authors' inability to write an answerable question, and its often awful explanations. It is a far inferior bank to UWorld, but it has its own examinee feedback that it uses to create step-like questions, some of which WILL show up. It definitely got me a few points, but is a far more frustrating experience and I would not do it unless you are solid on FA and ALL questions in UWorld.

 

[RadOncRocks]

Proceed like so: make and suspend tests with all your marked questions, make and suspend tests with all your incorrect questions, complete all of those tests, then repeat. Because UWorld's randomization feature is so poor, this will give you the broadest exposure to the topics that are most foreign to you.

Could you expand on this? What do you mean by the randomization feature being poor?

 

[ScubaStarved]

Could you expand on this? What do you mean by the randomization feature being poor?

If you make a test with all marked Qs, then complete the test while marking 25% of them again (because they are great questions not covered elsewhere), you will find that your next block of marked questions is really, really fresh in your mind because they were in your previous block. The randomization is not very random. If you have 1000 marked questions, do a test of 46 and remark 23 of them, I bet that 15+ show up on your next test of marked questions.

If instead you create 20 tests with 46 marked questions each without submitting the tests for grading (e.g., start and suspend) you will have no repeats in those 20 tests. This is better for 1) spaced learning and 2) efficiency in getting through all 1000 questions.

The idea is to start off with liberal marking of Qs. Then as your knowledge base expands, some of those ideas will not be so foreign or original, but some 30% might still be tricky. Re-mark the tricky ones and do not re-mark the easy ones. So you do iterations of marked and incorrect Qs until they are all so easy and/or fresh in your mind that you have mastered the bank.

 

[MossPoh]

I did notice the same thing with randomization. A few times I created a test with all used and unused questions and literally half the questions were from the last couple of blocks I did.

Side note, I agree with the qbank assessment as well. I just finished it, but much of that was muscling through it out of principle and not letting them beat me. I did get some useful information from it and my first aid is looking pretty big time now.

 

[ArcGurren]

Agreed with Scuba; I didn't have that many incorrects but those that I did I actually KEPT getting wrong even when I had just reviewed it. Showed that my knowledge of the subject was superficial or worse so I delved into it more.

 

[OOllie]

scuba, that sounds like a great idea. So for now ill redo my incorrect UW and then once all of them are mastered, ill switch to usmlerx/kaplan. thanks guys!