USMLE Weird feeling

[bobloblaw123]

---

Members don't see this ad.

Hi guys,

I hope all of you are doing well. I just wanted to write out some of the stuff that's been happening during my step 1 study period, jst to check to see if it's normal:

So I will be taking the exam in 2 weeks. Over the past couple of weeks, my UWorld score has increased from a 60-ish percent to to around 80-ish percent (my last 4 blocks were 85%). I have 23% of the qbank left. I have gone through FA once, and am going to attempt to go through it a second time before the exam.

I took two nbme's over the last week
NBME 17 - 230
NBME 12 - 249

The weird thing is, i feel like most question I am jst guessing on. Like there are a couple of questions that I know 100 %, but the majority i feel like im just not understanding the question, and am going with a guess. Is this the sort of feeling you're suppose to have??

The fact that my nbme is all over the place doesnt help either. I was planning to take NBME 15 this weekend, but other than that, do you guys have any advice??

 

[MarcusGunn]

Not sure if that's normal but I was also like that. I'd say ~15% of the answers I got right on the NBMEs felt like pattern recognition, and I couldn't really explain why the answer was correct, even though I knew it was correct. 😕

 

[Jabbed]

You've both reached Nirvana.

grats

 

[IMdoc2015]

I dont think what you're describing is too out of the ordinary. Half the battle is identifying what isn't right and being able to recognize patterns / common buzz words. When I took the exam I felt like I was guessing on almost every question but you underestimate how much of the material you've truly learned after youve gone through all the resources for this test and so much of your thought process for the test (and for your clinical rotations later) become almost automatic. Your scores and percentages are all moving in the right direction so I wouldnt worry about it. Good luck!