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Can this be a fluke?

1.7K views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  moe2185  
#1 ·
Hey guys, so I just did form 12 today and ended up scoring a 550 which apparently translates to 233 based off the NBME chart. I took form 3 last week and got a 410/200 and 440 on form 5. I have been going hard in terms of studying and really honing in on my weaker areas. My question is has this ever happened to anyone else where you see such a huge performance increase in such a short amount of time. I have been plateaued in the 410-440 range for a good month and a half.

Don't get me wrong im happy that I was able to improve, but then I have started 2nd guessing myself thinking this may just be a statistical outlier or something. Is form 12 easier? Did I just finally have a moment of clarity and was able to consolidate alot of information that was out of my reach 1 week ago? Any help would be great, my exam date is next week btw and I have no more assessments to do.
 
#2 ·
you are improving friend, what else u want, this is how u play the game, see ur weak areas and then work on them , hard work is getting paid off, i think u r improving. 200 questions are a lot in nbme, it cant be a fluk.
anyways. can u please tell me how much more do u have to go for ur exam, i have my exam in 50 days, and i am only trying to work on my weak areas, i got 177 last month and then 189 this month now i want to take another nbme in 5 days, what do u think i should do to improve? how do u see which are ur weak areas? like u work on that subjects or specific area? i really want to shoot 250 but time is only 50 days
 
#3 ·
My exam is next week, so I am in the 11th hour you can say. What happened to me was I studied alot for a long time and hit a brick wall of plateau madness in terms of assessments. I let it discourage me for 5 minutes after each NBME but when those 5 minutes were over I went straight to FA and read it making mental notes on questions that "fooled" me on the most recent test.

The way I assessed my weaknesses was basically through the use of Question banks. I noticed on the NBMEs that the performance bars are hard to judge by. What I mean by that is sometimes I'll get a high performance on some subjects and the next nbme it will be low so its really hard to gauge. What I did to gauge what my weak areas were was to do questions from uworld. After a couple hundred questions you really get a sense of what questions are whoppin your butt.

Me for example I noticed that for biochem questions I consistantly was having trouble with the metabolism questions because I simply did not know what enzymes did, so when you see them in the list of answers there really is no way to know which one is right. Same thing happened to me with anti microbials and neuro. When I noticed this trend a couple weeks ago I just sat down and hit those 3 subjects hard.....btw my nbme score on those 3 subjects (CNS, biochem, Micro/pharm) were not necessarily my "weak" areas according to the score reports before nbme 12. But by Using Uworld I was able to pin those subjects as my problem areas. You really need to just take a step back and be honest with yourself and admit that "ya these questions are hard for me", then focus focus focus.

That is just what I did though, maybe it will work for you as well. I just hope I can carry this trend over to the real thing.