Step 1 Experience - the real test

I have received a lot of questions about my step 1 test experience, so I wanted to give my official opinion on both talking to other people about their experiences as well as my own individual experience.

Okay, so first, what does it mean to gain incite from someone who has taken the test? We all know it's illegal to share questions and answers after the test, but people still do it, and they do it in two annoying ways that never quite satisfy our urge to see the real, until we actually take it, and can really mess a person up prior to taking the test. So in the following two paragraphs I explain the warning signs of talking to others who have taken the test (even in talking to someone like me about my experience!).

The first way, is people sharing their personal, SUBJECTIVE experiences from a generalized point of view; and the second is posting a laundry list of topics they remember right after taking the test. The problem with subjective experiences is that they range considerably. After my friends took their tests before me (a week before), they scared the pants off of me with the following phrases: "the hardest test of my life" "I never finished a block," "nothing like uworld or nbme's," "the question stems were all ten times as long as the practice questions," "I wanted to cry between every block..." You get the point. Whereas my own experience (I will detail below) was the EXACT opposite. These friends of mine were also, I should note, pretty smart and had studied a lot (or so I thought), so I at first took their opinion as somewhat reliable and had a near mental break down after talking to them and a week before my test.

Anyways, the second way people relay information is by posting a list of the topics tested, i.e. "I had anatomy questions on the brachial plexus repeatedly, and also one about the contents of the splenorenal ligament." Before my test, I had found some nice bootlegged word docs with tab-format lists of questions people had. I read it over and over and studied it and looked up answers I didn't know. However, one should be weary to buy into these resources right away. The most obvious reason that this may not be the most helpful resource is that a person may in fact be lying. You get your score not based on a curve that includes people just from your test day, but from one that includes people from your test MONTH. That's why it takes so long to receive your score. So it is, in fact, in my best interest to complete my test, then race home only to post a completely fake representation of what I had just seen so that people study the wrong information before they take their own tests. This DOES happen and you should be weary if it is someone other than a close friend sharing this kind of information. The other not-so-obvious reason to not follow these lists is that every test is different and the likelihood of getting the exact same question is low, albeit it does happen, and you should count on getting a similar question on a similar topic more so than the actual question itself. But in the end, it is of greater yield to re read first aid than it is to study specific question topics because your test could really be on any of the high-yield topics. They also don't favor one organ system over another. If they do, count on the one you got the most questions on having several questions thrown out, because those were the experimental ones. i.e. "it was ALL anatomy questions!!" The board-makers know you can't become a doctor just from knowing anatomy...

Now for MY EXPERIENCE (with the following caveats above):

First off, you should only listen to someone who took the test and got his/her score back. Case and point: If someone is saying, "oh it was so easy" and then gets a 190, well he/she probably doesn't know too much about the medical boards, let alone medicine, let alone life, in general. Or if someone says, "It was so hard, there were questions I DID NOT KNOW!" and he/she then gets a 280, well those questions he/she didn't know were probably the experimental questions that didn't count. That same person is probably super human too and/or works for the CIA - I wouldn't trust him.

So I am going to be open with you and disclose that I got a 260. If it was not obvious already based on my prior posts, that's the score I got, now you know, and now I want to share my impression of the test with you based on two things: 1) What I studied and how I prepared, which directly led to my impression of the test, 2) the actual test and what was going on in my mind during it.

1) I started 6 months out. I know, shocking! so early (or for some crazy people, so late) in the test-studying period to start. But I took my test in June and I started Uworld exactly on Jan. 1st. I was still in classes so up until 2 months out, I was balancing both coursework and board studying, so it was not fully dedicated time. But for about 2 months prior to the test, I did full dedicated board study. See my post http://www.testpirates.com/index.php?threads/how-i-got-a-260-on-step-1.1/ for more info. So that was my duration, and during that time, I did Uworld 3 times, I did almost all the nbme practice tests (I think 4-5), both uworld practice tests, I read FA probably cover to cover and slowly 4.5 times, and I listened to all of goljian twice and pathoma, once. I didn't use flashcards much so I wouldn't even count those, and I did supplement with a couple books on things I didn't understand (i.e. biochem, immuno), but I didn't read these supplemental books cover to cover. I did NOT use DIT. I did NOT use another qbank, except I used USMLE Rx qbank starting after my first year to help me study for my courses. In short, I studied a lot. I didn't have the best foundation from first year, so I had to make up for that, but my second year I worked hard and did study for all my organ system classes with the boards in mind. I was not at the top of my class until the end of second year - I would have called myself an average student at the end of first year. And that's about it. Oh, and my scores on my practice tests really helped me gauge my actual score. I started 2 months out at like a 215. Then went from 215-->220-->225-->235-->242-->251-->256-->263-->265+ (the first ones were nbme and the last two were both uworld).

2) The ACTUAL TEST: The look of the test is exactly like uworld, with the question numbers on the side the whole time so you can see what you marked and which to go back to (unlike NBME). So uworld, you get +20points for bootlegging that and copying the real exam setup. The questions were more similar to uworld than nbme but the overall test felt like neither. The reason being is that uworld only gives you so many practice questions, and they're all really good freaking questions. But the boards pulls its questions from a massive MASSIVE qbank, so you are BOUND to get both good and bad questions, both one-step and three-step questions, and both long and short questions. So when people say ITS NOTHING LIKE UWORLD, that's because it isn't. They're going to give you easy questions (uworld doesn't waste time with these) so that they test your basic medical knowledge and don't prep you for an exam like uworld is suppose to do. But what I will say is this: that for those 3-step, difficult questions on the test, uworld helped me prepare like no other. And that's because uworld has truly mastered the art of making you think like the board examiners want you to think for those tricky questions that separate you from just passing, from the 220s, from the high scorers of 240s and above. Now here is the best part. There's other questions that are WEIRD, and HARD, and you are NOT SUPPOSE TO KNOW THE ANSWER. But people get tripped up by these and it messes them up in answering both the easy questions and also the hard questions that uworld prepped you for. I see this all the time when I tutor people. They say the real test was like nothing what they had seen before. You know what we call these people? Poor test-takers (which can be fixed!). The GOOD test-takers treat every question like it's the first they're seeing. If there's one of those hard, experimental questions, or a question that will be thrown out because absolutely no one is going to know it and it plain SUCKS, well then the POOR test-takers freak out, and the next easy or harder three-step question that they get, that they in fact CAN answer, they mess up and get wrong, because they're thinking about that one terrible question written by a retired idiot doctor that for some reason made it onto the exam.

So, I say to the POOR test-taker: I am sorry you had that experience. I am sorry to my friends who scared the crap out of me before I took my test and said the real exam was the hardest test of their lives. But please don't go around scaring everyone else! And there is hope for you just yet! You can become a GOOD test-taker very easily, it just takes practice. In fact, the ultimate practice test would be one that does mimic the boards and has both hard uworld type questions, easy easy throw away questions that people laugh at, and bad, really poorly written questions, that in the end, are thrown out once the test and results are analyzed.