UWorld Unused, Tutor, Nonrandom

[BillyRubinstein]

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I've been doing pretty good with UWorld lately - finished almost 60% of it so far, and my cumulative avg. is 69%. Before I start q's, I like to get through the material relative to a body system. I do the questions unused, tutor, and nonrandom (helps me correct my wrong answers rather quickly, while my wrong thinking patern is still fresh). The questions are nonrandom relative to the body system (eg. i'll choose to do only neuro q's or only cardio q's), but I make the subject areas within the system random (eg. path, physio, pharm..etc). I've noticed almost everyone on this site does random, timed, unused and you all come up with which averages correlate with which board scores.....well do you all think a 69% cumulative average with the method I'm doing UWorld has a similar predictive value to a 69% cum. avg. the way most of you all do it? It''s pretty unimportant in the end, just curious as to what everyone thinks.

 

[MSKalltheway]

In the end I dont think it will make a huge difference, IMO. I did what you are doing towards the beginning. I would get a few questions right because looking at the answer choices, you KNEW all but one had nothing to do with the system you were doing questions on. Towards the end, I knew enough that even if I did it randomly, timed, and unused, my average didn't go down at all.

I experimented with that by doing random, unused and timed questions when I was ~85% done. My averages were still at an appropriate level (meaning peaking) when I did the last couple of blocks like this. My NBMEs went up appropriately also, so I think you'll be just fine. Unofficial SDN consensus seems to be that your average on the last 5 blocks when timed, random, and unused are the best predictors of your score. That is, if UW has good predictive value.

Remember, UW is really a learning tool anyway, so the most important thing about the qbank is not so much how you did your blocks, but how much you learned from them and if you got used to the style of questioning.

 

[2cr8tive]

i did the first maybe 10% of the usmle world in subjec wise and scored over 80 percent. then changed to unused randome timed and my avg is 63% and im now done with about 60% of the q bank. interestingly my avg hasnt changed in a couple of weeks even though ive had many tests that i got 68-72 but i had many with very low 60s as well. just my 2c

 

[Instatewaiter]

I've been doing pretty good with UWorld lately - finished almost 60% of it so far, and my cumulative avg. is 69%. Before I start q's, I like to get through the material relative to a body system. I do the questions unused, tutor, and nonrandom (helps me correct my wrong answers rather quickly, while my wrong thinking patern is still fresh). The questions are nonrandom relative to the body system (eg. i'll choose to do only neuro q's or only cardio q's), but I make the subject areas within the system random (eg. path, physio, pharm..etc). I've noticed almost everyone on this site does random, timed, unused and you all come up with which averages correlate with which board scores.....well do you all think a 69% cumulative average with the method I'm doing UWorld has a similar predictive value to a 69% cum. avg. the way most of you all do it? It''s pretty unimportant in the end, just curious as to what everyone thinks.

While doing questions on a system right after you have studied that system is probably helping you learn I would be surprised if it didnt bump up that average significantly.

So personally I dont think your percentage equates to the same percentage of someone doing random questions but again, Uworld shouldnt be used to gauge where you are, but rather as a learning tool.

NMBEs probably will tell you where you stand. Have you taken any of those?

 

[BillyRubinstein]

While doing questions on a system right after you have studied that system is probably helping you learn I would be surprised if it didnt bump up that average significantly.

So personally I dont think your percentage equates to the same percentage of someone doing random questions but again, Uworld shouldnt be used to gauge where you are, but rather as a learning tool.

NMBEs probably will tell you where you stand. Have you taken any of those?

I know what you mean. I'm sure it does help having just read a section prior to doing questions on it since that material is most fresh in my head. I have taken some nbme's - started off with a 219 on 1 and worked my way up to 228 on 4. I'm really hoping to get this thing to 240 by test day in 2 weeks. I haven't taken an nbme in a while and i've definitely gotten through a lot more material since then, so i feel like i'm headin in the right direction.

 

[BillyRubinstein]

i did the first maybe 10% of the usmle world in subjec wise and scored over 80 percent. then changed to unused randome timed and my avg is 63% and im now done with about 60% of the q bank. interestingly my avg hasnt changed in a couple of weeks even though ive had many tests that i got 68-72 but i had many with very low 60s as well. just my 2c

Random or not, those are good scores though you have, regardless if they're not going up recently. I wouldn't stress too much over it since your randoms are still significantly above avg.

 

[deepbluesea]

should i memorize dsm iv? it's not mentioned in the 2008 first aid at all in the behavioral science section but there's a qn on usmle world where you have to recognize the type of personality disorder.

 

[superoxide]

should i memorize dsm iv? it's not mentioned in the 2008 first aid at all in the behavioral science section but there's a qn on usmle world where you have to recognize the type of personality disorder.

Me thinks you can figure out personality disorders without memorizing DSM IV! The info in FA should suffice.

 

[deepbluesea]

Me thinks you can figure out personality disorders without memorizing DSM IV! The info in FA should suffice.

the question was really easy you were given a scenario and had to figure out that it was avoidant personality disorder but the explanations went into a little bit of depth about classification methods of dsm iv. i wasn't sure if we really have to know all that detail explanations given or if first aid is enough to go by...

 

[VPDcurt]

I wouldn't memorize the DSM. I found that behavioral/psych was REALLY straightforward on the real thing (obviously that's just my opinion, for whatever it's worth - probably less than 2 cents).

 

[VPDcurt]

...

 

[BrisketAttack]

should i memorize dsm iv? it's not mentioned in the 2008 first aid at all in the behavioral science section but there's a qn on usmle world where you have to recognize the type of personality disorder.

Yeah, it's probably best if you were to memorize DSM IV, just to be safe. Then with all your extra time, go ahead and memorize Robbins Path and maybe Guyton Phys. This should only take you a few hours or so.

 

[LadyWolverine]

Remember, UW is really a learning tool anyway, so the most important thing about the qbank is not so much how you did your blocks, but how much you learned from them and if you got used to the style of questioning.

Right on, MSK. I chose to do blocks of questions containing material from the system that I'd already reviewed (in Goljan, FA, pharm, and physio/anatomy) - for example, I'd click all subjects, and then pick 1 system, like cardio. Then I'd do untimed/tutor/unused, until I exhausted the Qs for that particular system (or subject, in the case of biochem/behav sci/etc). I also took the time to very thoroughly read through the answers to the Qs.

Probably overkill in retrospect, especially since I ran out of time towards the end. But my point is that I used UW in the same way I would have used a review book, and I took the time to annotate the important stuff into FA.

I do agree though that it was annoying to get asked questions which you automatically knew the answer to because there was only one answer choice relevant to the subject at hand. Luckily, there weren't too many of these, and the explanations were always helpful to read.

 

[LadyWolverine]

Yeah, it's probably best if you were to memorize DSM IV, just to be safe. Then with all your extra time, go ahead and memorize Robbins Path and maybe Guyton Phys. This should only take you a few hours or so.

👍

 

[Helo]

for what its worth, i did UW on timed, random, unused for 100% of the bank. i found this to work for me because i am much better at contextual learning than one subject at a time. we'll see if it worked for me later in the month...ughhh

 

[thedrjojo]

for the first maybe 30%-40% of UW i did questions timed, unused but only in the subject matter i studied (i did it subject based, not systems based, so if i was studying biochem, id do all biochem questions...) i never exhausted any subject (except histo... 16 questions only? WTF) and was averaging about 72-73%... i then went to timed, unused, and random for the rest of it and actually slowly raised myself up to 76% by the time I finished like 95% of UW... i think my 72% was downward skewed by doing many more path and pharm questions (maybe 2/3rds of that first 30-40% of questions i did, compared to closer to a 1/3rd to a half of the next 60-70%) because the overall breakdown per subject did not get changed too much (some did improve slightly)... so basically i didn't do much differently when i was studying and when it was totally random... but I feel I did much better on the NBME exam (Exam 3- 250) and on Step 1 (254) than I was doing on UW (76% ~80th percentile), so don't fret

 

[deepbluesea]

Yeah, it's probably best if you were to memorize DSM IV, just to be safe. Then with all your extra time, go ahead and memorize Robbins Path and maybe Guyton Phys. This should only take you a few hours or so.

well i actually do have alot of time i'm not going to be taking the exam for awhile..probably still have about a good 8 months. but i guess i didn't mean if i should memorize dsm iv... it's just that ive heard that first aid was sufficient but i just got usmle world today and i started with the behavioral sci section. of all the questions that i had done none were mentioned in first aid. i wasn't sure if i should go back and look up those other topics..such as going back to dsm iv and refreshing my memory...or if i should just not bother with it since it's not even mentioned in first aid.

 

[IndyZX]

hilarious.