Dont worry about it. Alot of us wont get into competitive specialties regardless of the change of Step
People matched to competitive specialties just fine in the 1990s and early 2000s when the Step exams didn't exist and/or nobody cared at all about your score. Don't freak out.
So what did residency programs use to differentiate candidates? Like what was the “step” of the 90’s?
There wasn't a step of the 90s. It was a mix of all the other stuff still present now - Letters, audition rotations, clinical grades and AOA, research, MSPE and class rank, if the school gives a class rank, etc. The idea that we could take a basic knowledge-check licensure exam, pretend it was an aptitude test, and use it to screen and prioritize applicants, was a relatively recent phenomenon.
In the 90s, program directors didn't have 1000s of applications for a dozen spots and as a result, PDs could realistically read through all of the applications and evaluate them holistically. Nowadays, there are too many applications for the old system to work. To say that we used to get by without step 1 ignores the fact that our situation has changed.
