USMLE Advice from a friend
Got this from a friend of mine who I asked for advice from. He recently took it and this was his take. Though I don’t know about buying USMLE Rx (I have parts of it and its pretty easy) everything seems to hold true:
“Step 1 is a more than doable exam. I studied really hard from what everyone suggested doing. First aid/ usmle world. But to tell you the truth if I went back I would have done questions from usmle r/x. I realized after the exam that the rx qbank which is basically first aid on the computer; really hammers in the first aid material.
Conceptually the first aid covers a huge percent of the exam as i’m sure everyone tells you. For pharm I’d say 99 percent was there. so if you can i’d maybe try the r/x because anything that helps you master first aid material is a definite plus!Usmle word is great in that when i sat for the exam I felt as though it was just another world test. Beware of doing so many world questions that you memorize because at that point you should be doing fresh questions.
I used the NBME exams that you can buy online to really gauge where I was at in terms of exam date etc. NBME 1 i felt was easiest, 2 was a little harder and 4 was pretty tough. My exam was sort of a mix of 2 and 4. Some people told me not to do nbme 3 because it is not that accurate. I really recommend doing the NBMEs if you have the time, and to really trust what they tell you (give or take 5-8 points).I was warned that neuro was growing in popularity as a tested item, and that was correct. I had a lot of cross sectional type questions, and the neuro section of first aid is something that you really want to spend a lot of time with. Its better to know that neuro section COLD than to go wondering off into too many other resources bec neuro can be a daunting subject ya kno.
Psych was not hard; pretty straight foward with the exception of a 1 or 2 really tricky ones, but more or less it was not bad. For biostats do this: a week or so before the exam sit down and take all the usmle world bio stats question at the same time. Master those questions and you will not have any problem with ones on real test. I had many conceptual repeats to world on my biostats section. (as well as many repeat pics from other sections of world questions)”
The only difference in what I’ve learned from Kaplan is that Endocrine is starting to become a HUGE deal on the test from something like 20-30 questions. Not sure how true that statment is but from the people I’ve talked to it seems to be about right.
Till next time…..
Related Tags : experience, advice, step 1
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