What the he11 is wrong with me?!

[racerx]

When I started the Kaplan Qbank, I was hitting in the 70% range. After finishing FA, I am now scoring 59-65% on "new" questions.

I swear it seems like the questions are becoming more difficult. They seem more difficult than the NBME3 exam. . .hope it's the same for USMLE or I'm screwed.

Anyone else feel as if the Qbank q's get tougher as you progress?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[BrisketAttack]

exact same thing happened to me. so what did I do? stopped kaplan qbank altogether. i didn't need that confidence buster. I've focused solely on uworld, and although it hands me my ass now and again, it's just a better qbank. period. **** kaplan. it's a piece of ****. kaplan should rename their qbank to "anatomy tutorial". freakin losers. did they not get the memo that anatomy's low yield? apparently not with my 10+ anatomy question per random block on 7 straight tests.

 

[lunallena]

hehe while i was doing the usmle qbank i got these questions on the cords of the brachial plexus. i was like WHATTTTTTTTTTTTT oh no!

 

[DwyaneWade]

''

 

[GynGuy1983]

I wish I knew about this earlier, but if you have the time and plan on doing 2 banks of questions, either simultaneously or separately, do World and USMLE Consult (Elsevier). Kaplan is a worthless Qbank and a waste of time. The explanations to the questions are terrible and they don't test the material that's actually on the exam. They focus on stupid minutiae that is insignificant and I've also had blocks where one thing usually is over tested like anatomy or genetics. I won't even mention the fact that the questions don't resemble anything like those on the NBME's or from the actual exam (I'm going by what others have told me, including my sister). As for USMLE Consult, you can do a 30 question free test on their site, plus in their explanations, they cite the material in most of the review books that we use like Rapid Review, Goljan, Robbins, etc. You can also save the pictures and charts to your hard drive, or so I've heard

As for the brachial plexus, that is actually very high yield and expect to have a couple of questions come up from that on your exam. I hear that most of the anatomy will primarily be the upper member (brachial plexus and musculature), lower member (again nervous and muscular), and I wouldn't be surprised if they threw in a hernia, some neuroanatomy, and my favorite, the eye

 

[BrisketAttack]

i've got UE anatomy down. uworld handles this well. what I don't need is to worry about the third freakin branch of the maxillary artery, sending some minibranch to somewhere in the eye or brain. kaplan apparently feels this is critical info. maybe if I was headed in to perform neurosurgery tomorrow instead of take a test on the rudimentary aspects of clinical science. stupid a-holes.

 

[BrisketAttack]

oh, and while I'm on a roll, I would gladly pay my first year salary to know the location of the residence of the mother f-er who decided we needed to know that the HLA-DR7 haplotype is associated with steroid-responsive nephrotic syndrome. This is the most asinine piece of info in human existence and I doubt that there's a nephrologist on earth who knows this. additionally, knowing this does absolutely nothing for treatment, and nothing for diagnosis. utter rubbish. damn, it riles me up.

 

[synapse lapse]

oh, and while I'm on a roll, I would gladly pay my first year salary to know the location of the residence of the mother f-er who decided we needed to know that the HLA-DR7 haplotype is associated with steroid-responsive nephrotic syndrome. This is the most asinine piece of info in human existence and I doubt that there's a nephrologist on earth who knows this. additionally, knowing this does absolutely nothing for treatment, and nothing for diagnosis. utter rubbish. damn, it riles me up.

I think it's absurd we have to learn any of these HLA associations or what genes certain things map to. As our knowledge increases about what parts of the genome different diseases map to, we will undoubtedly find thousands of associations with certain areas of the genome. Will future med students have an entire class based solely on memorizing the genome? Of course not, that would be absurd. We should only have to know causal mutations, not just associations.

 

[VPDcurt]

Kaplan QBank is a total waste. I stopped using it about a week ago because I couldn't stand how annoying it was. It's almost like they try to cover all their bases in terms of information, but it just makes it incredibly annoying. I took their SAT prep course back in the day and it sucked too.

 

[GynGuy1983]

Kaplan QBank is a total waste. I stopped using it about a week ago because I couldn't stand how annoying it was. It's almost like they try to cover all their bases in terms of information, but it just makes it incredibly annoying. I took their SAT prep course back in the day and it sucked too.

+1

I couldn't stand reading through the vignettes anymore. They were so tedious and annoying with too much superfluous, unnecessary information.

 

[BrisketAttack]

I'm lovin' the kaplan bashing. Man, there were a few times i toiled through one of their 50 question sets, breaking it down, only to get into an argument with my computer. I nearly took a hammer to it a couple times. i especially love the question where they ask for derivatives of the pharyngeal arches, and all the answer options are derivatives of the aortic arches. that's an absurb thing to miss in the editing process. I've seen a few misspelled words in uworld, but that's it. not glaring errors like kaplan. also, kaplan is outright wrong in a few questions. they have one that said Ach is responsible for initiating sleep. bullcrap. it's serotonin.

 

[The Angriest Bird]

This is not a joke and I really hope I don't get banned for posting this.

But I did watch web porn sometimes while doing Kaplan. Nuff said.

 

[racerx]

This is not a joke and I really hope I don't get banned for posting this.

But I did watch web porn sometimes while doing Kaplan. Nuff said.

Are you saying that it was so easy you could do it while "distracted"?