[dazzles]

UWSA 1 says my lowest scoring subject is cell biology/histology. Is it possible to improve that in a week? I wouldn't mind spending a few hours on it if it's worth it. What book or website would you recommend? Please help me. My exam is REALLY soon and I'd like to at least try to improve a bit in this subject.

 

[Haisook]

Kaplan's anatomy section on histology & cytology is around 90 pages. If you read them, may be read like 15 pages everyday, it would help a lot.

I did it from there while watching the videos. But I was quite good at histology in med school actually, so I'm doing well in it (unlike embryology for instance!).

If you have already done it from Kaplan, I don't know about any other source...

 

[dazzles]

Thanks. I skimmed it a long time ago. During the live Kaplan class, the anatomy teacher said it wasn't that important so I didn't pay much attention to it. I guess I'll read it properly this time. Hopefully it'll help.

 

[Haisook]

Thanks. I skimmed it a long time ago. During the live Kaplan class, the anatomy teacher said it wasn't that important so I didn't pay much attention to it. I guess I'll read it properly this time. Hopefully it'll help.

Yeah, I don't think there would be that many histology questions in the exam. May be in UWSA there were a couple of them, and you got them wrong, so it said you scored low in histology. That's why I don't pay much attention to subcategories, because usually there aren't enough questions to justify such evaluation. I look at the main subjects as whole (Anatomy, Pathology,..etc). If you're doing good in anatomy as a whole, you're fine. Just have a quick read in Kaplan's histology.

 

[usmleguy]

hey dazzles !!

which UWSA did you give??
what was the score??
i gave UWSA 2 today...man...those questions were really .... although i scored 650 ( 3 digit eqv of 248) but still felt the questions were pretty tough but i guess that's what you expect from UWORLD.....
i have been hearing that UWSA overestimates the score ...is it true??..

 

[dazzles]

@ Haisook = I'll skim Kaplan Histo REALLY fast lol. If it doesn't help for the next assessment I take, then I'll just give up on histology and pray I don't get too many histo questions haha. I want to make sure I'm confident with the other subjects. I'm equally good/bad at all the subjects except pathology for which my score was really high. (Thanks to Goljan. ) I've noticed it takes a lot of work just to keep my score stable on these assessments. Maybe it's just me?

@ usmleguy = I took UWSA 1. I got a 600 (240) but I felt like I was going to fail when I was taking it. I narrowed a lot of questions down to two and flagged appx 15 questions per block. Some questions were straight forward and easy but others were really weird. I definitely thought it was harder that NBME 5 and 6. I still have to do NBME 7 and UWSA 2 in the next few days. I've seen mixed reviews about the UWSA scores vs real USMLE score. Basically, if it's done within a week or two of your real exam, it's a pretty accurate representation of how you'll do on the real exam.

 

[lee-usmle]

Several histology resources mentioned here
Threads Tagged with Histology