Well, I guess I owe it back to this great forum, which has helped me a lot in soo many ways to prepare myself for step 1, and now that I'm finally done with a score of 243/86, I have to say I'm pretty relieved.
To start off with, I'm an IMG, YOG-2012, from India.
I started by preparations around May 2012, started by doing the Kaplan lecture videos along with KLN. Most of which I found quite interesting (except maybe cell bio, histo and neuroanat, that guy is really terrible). The KLN notes are quite adequate for most subjects, in fact might be a tad too detailed for some (like neuroanat, cell bio, histo in my personal opinion). Some KLN notes are indispensable, like physio, pharm, micro and immunology.
It took me about 2 months to do the videos once along with side by side KLN reading and annotation of extra points from the videos. I did NOT do path from either KLN or the kaplan videos. I instead listened to the Goljan audios, which might be quite old by now, but its still quite a gem, and really makes you think in terms of how the USMLE questions are framed. I did the audios along with goljan's Rapid Review, which is another excellent book, because it really combines every subject into that book, a lot of correlations and connections, which you really need for such an exam.
So after my 1st read of all KLN except path and Goljan RR, I did a quite 2 week revision of everything I'd read till then, before starting on tackling uworld. I think thats quite crucial, the fact that its necessary that you are good at your kaplan material before you start uworld, makes learning from uworld much more easier, because then you're just learning new facts, not re-learning facts you forgot from your 1st read.
Uworld as an indicator of your performance and progress has been discussed elsewhere, but to add my two cents worth, i found it quite useful, at the start i was getting around 60%, but then i moved on to 75% and over the last few blocks i was crossing 80% occasionally. While it may not be a predictor of your actual score in any way, its a good indicator of how well prepared you are.
Also make uworld notes in a book of something of points you didnt know previously. These notes come useful the day before your exam, as a quick review. Helped me loads. Uworld took me about a month and 10 days to complete fully, which i had another 20 days left on my subscription, i decided not to do the uworld questions i got wrong again, because i had taken extensive notes the first time around, which i trusted to help me the day before my exam.
Also needless to say, but do uworld online, offers tremendous advantages.
At this point i'd like to say i did not touch FA even once for my exam. I bought the book ages ago, and planned to read it along side my uworld preps, but i never found the time or the motivation, because i was quite comfortable with the KLN+goljan RR, i didnt want to change books. I just kept referring and reviewing those books instead of FA. While FA might be useful for people who don't wanna go through those KLN volumes again, its not a must, as most of it is covered by KLN+uworld anyway.
I took NBME 12 around 2 months before my exam (right before i started uworld) and i got a 220, which i felt was decent for that time.
I took NBME 7 and NBME 13 around a week before my exam and got 242 and 252 respectively, so for me NBME 7 was the most predictive i guess.
UWSA, like many others have said, over predicts, UWSA 1- 255, UWSA 2- 262
The free 150 was a good simple test just to get the brain cells working, and i did it the night of my test. Got 91%, but i dont think too much emphasis should be made on that score really.
My last 2 weeks before the exam was spent doing NBMEs, UWSAs, revising KLN and goljan and my uworld notes (2 fat notebooks)
I did not do much studying in the last week though, i guess i knew i had done all i could do and i just wanted to get the exam done with (i had some complications with my prometric centre, resulting in my exam being postponed by a week, to a different city)
The day of the exam
The questions were predominantly straightforward questions, i had a habit right from my uworld days of marking questions even if i had a 1% doubt about the answer i had marked, so by those standards, per block in the exam i marked around 20, which means around 25-26 per block i was sure of my answer, which is quite different from how i felt doing the nbmes or uworld.
There were around 6-8 questions per block that were quite hard. Solvable i felt, but hard. Based on concepts i was comfortable with, but the question that was asked, or the graphs or images that was displayed complicated issues.
In the whole exam, there must have been only 3 WTF questions to my memory (one of which i got right! i checked it out online later)
About managing your breaks, i didnt find time an issue at all, i invariably had 5 mins left from my block everytime even after reviewing my answers, so i had all that time added to my break. I ended my exam with half hour of break time still remaining.
About images. Most image questions can be answered from the stem of the question without really needing to look at the image. In a few cases the image just served as a confirmation of the answer i already thought of.
Auscultation questions, i got a couple. One was without a question stem pretty much, and the murmur wasn't exactly very clear, but it wasn't impossible either.
Well, I think that's all I can really think of telling people about my experience. Any questions, feel free to ask!
Cheers.
To start off with, I'm an IMG, YOG-2012, from India.
I started by preparations around May 2012, started by doing the Kaplan lecture videos along with KLN. Most of which I found quite interesting (except maybe cell bio, histo and neuroanat, that guy is really terrible). The KLN notes are quite adequate for most subjects, in fact might be a tad too detailed for some (like neuroanat, cell bio, histo in my personal opinion). Some KLN notes are indispensable, like physio, pharm, micro and immunology.
It took me about 2 months to do the videos once along with side by side KLN reading and annotation of extra points from the videos. I did NOT do path from either KLN or the kaplan videos. I instead listened to the Goljan audios, which might be quite old by now, but its still quite a gem, and really makes you think in terms of how the USMLE questions are framed. I did the audios along with goljan's Rapid Review, which is another excellent book, because it really combines every subject into that book, a lot of correlations and connections, which you really need for such an exam.
So after my 1st read of all KLN except path and Goljan RR, I did a quite 2 week revision of everything I'd read till then, before starting on tackling uworld. I think thats quite crucial, the fact that its necessary that you are good at your kaplan material before you start uworld, makes learning from uworld much more easier, because then you're just learning new facts, not re-learning facts you forgot from your 1st read.
Uworld as an indicator of your performance and progress has been discussed elsewhere, but to add my two cents worth, i found it quite useful, at the start i was getting around 60%, but then i moved on to 75% and over the last few blocks i was crossing 80% occasionally. While it may not be a predictor of your actual score in any way, its a good indicator of how well prepared you are.
Also make uworld notes in a book of something of points you didnt know previously. These notes come useful the day before your exam, as a quick review. Helped me loads. Uworld took me about a month and 10 days to complete fully, which i had another 20 days left on my subscription, i decided not to do the uworld questions i got wrong again, because i had taken extensive notes the first time around, which i trusted to help me the day before my exam.
Also needless to say, but do uworld online, offers tremendous advantages.
At this point i'd like to say i did not touch FA even once for my exam. I bought the book ages ago, and planned to read it along side my uworld preps, but i never found the time or the motivation, because i was quite comfortable with the KLN+goljan RR, i didnt want to change books. I just kept referring and reviewing those books instead of FA. While FA might be useful for people who don't wanna go through those KLN volumes again, its not a must, as most of it is covered by KLN+uworld anyway.
I took NBME 12 around 2 months before my exam (right before i started uworld) and i got a 220, which i felt was decent for that time.
I took NBME 7 and NBME 13 around a week before my exam and got 242 and 252 respectively, so for me NBME 7 was the most predictive i guess.
UWSA, like many others have said, over predicts, UWSA 1- 255, UWSA 2- 262
The free 150 was a good simple test just to get the brain cells working, and i did it the night of my test. Got 91%, but i dont think too much emphasis should be made on that score really.
My last 2 weeks before the exam was spent doing NBMEs, UWSAs, revising KLN and goljan and my uworld notes (2 fat notebooks)
I did not do much studying in the last week though, i guess i knew i had done all i could do and i just wanted to get the exam done with (i had some complications with my prometric centre, resulting in my exam being postponed by a week, to a different city)
The day of the exam
The questions were predominantly straightforward questions, i had a habit right from my uworld days of marking questions even if i had a 1% doubt about the answer i had marked, so by those standards, per block in the exam i marked around 20, which means around 25-26 per block i was sure of my answer, which is quite different from how i felt doing the nbmes or uworld.
There were around 6-8 questions per block that were quite hard. Solvable i felt, but hard. Based on concepts i was comfortable with, but the question that was asked, or the graphs or images that was displayed complicated issues.
In the whole exam, there must have been only 3 WTF questions to my memory (one of which i got right! i checked it out online later)
About managing your breaks, i didnt find time an issue at all, i invariably had 5 mins left from my block everytime even after reviewing my answers, so i had all that time added to my break. I ended my exam with half hour of break time still remaining.
About images. Most image questions can be answered from the stem of the question without really needing to look at the image. In a few cases the image just served as a confirmation of the answer i already thought of.
Auscultation questions, i got a couple. One was without a question stem pretty much, and the murmur wasn't exactly very clear, but it wasn't impossible either.
Well, I think that's all I can really think of telling people about my experience. Any questions, feel free to ask!
Cheers.