[matthew messiha]

i made the offline version of NBME from 1 - 6
and i made the 2 self assessment exams of usmleworld
and they were not bad
but i made the online NBME form 7 and i scored 196 ,
so i cancelled my exam and i studied again
and now i want to assess myself again - so i can know if there is any improvement or not and if i ready for the exam or not - what can i do?

 

[ashishkabir]

You really shouldn't have used up all the NBMEs offline - they are not meant to be a learning tool - they are supposed to be a diagnostic tool instead. You're left without a reliable indicator now, unfortunately. Don't despair though. There is still the free 150 questions available from the NBME themselves. The only other recommendation that I have is possibly a qbank like USMLEConsult or the new Kaplan Qbank (after about June 2010 if you haven't subscribed to it during that time) that you haven't touched yet. If you are getting in the >65% range in 8 sequential random timed blocks I'd say you're close to ready - but it has to be 8 blocks in a row and it has to be taken online under exam conditions.

Good luck... let me know what you end up doing and maybe I can guide a little further...

 

[Haisook]

You really shouldn't have used up all the NBMEs offline - they are not meant to be a learning tool - they are supposed to be a diagnostic tool instead. You're left without a reliable indicator now, unfortunately. Don't despair though. There is still the free 150 questions available from the NBME themselves. The only other recommendation that I have is possibly a qbank like USMLEConsult or the new Kaplan Qbank (after about June 2010 if you haven't subscribed to it during that time) that you haven't touched yet. If you are getting in the >65% range in 8 sequential random timed blocks I'd say you're close to ready - but it has to be 8 blocks in a row and it has to be taken online under exam conditions.

Good luck... let me know what you end up doing and maybe I can guide a little further...

They should be 7 blocks, with an hour of break time (if tutorial in the exam is skipped).

 

[ashishkabir]

7 blocks - absolutely right.

 

[heights]

I think that's a great suggestion to do the Qbank in random timed blocks to get an estimate. Also, unless you feel like you memorized the offline NBMEs, it might be worth it to do another form online, such as Form 5 or 6.
For other folks reading this, people are always asking about offline material, but the simple fact is that the offline form doesn't give you the real exam experience since they are not on a testing interface. Thus, your scores on these are unreliable. While they may repeat questions from the practice forms on your exam, the reality is that would still be a small fraction of your test. Bottom line...use the online NBMEs to assess where you are; there is practically no value to doing offline tests.

 

[Haisook]

I'd also like to add that if there's one downside to NBME, it's the fact that its interface is not like the one you're going to see in the exam. The nearest interface to the actual one is the official practice program, and UW (comes next). Kaplan Qbank interface is almost similar but I found it to be less intuitive and kind of buggy (e.g. sometimes highlighting does not work,...etc).