My last Question is that… which Assessment FORM ..either UWORLD or NBME is a straight away actuall corelation with this EXAM,, coz i have been told that nowadays USMLE WORLD is the real thing and that they are what you will see 80% in the real exam and NBME just distorts ur emotions and might bring down ur confidence one way or the other way.. i mean totally confused.. also tell me where can i find ur Prep Stuff and ur strategies…

THANKS
ADNAN

sorry to be the bringer of bad news. But 200 is as bad as it can get. You need a 400 to have a good chance of passing this exam. Since you have used the right materials to study (except for qbanks, you need to do qbanks too) the main problem maybe is that you do not know how to study for the USMLE. If you look at the forums, people study the same materials all the time, some get 99’s, others fail. So problem lies elsewhere. There is no way you can take the exam in 15 days. In fact with your score, there is no way you can take the exam in the next couple of months. If you were to make a chart, after 6 months of study how much progress have you made. If you started at 0 (highly doubtful, since when I started my prep I was around 200 and this was because I was an old grad 16 years out of medical school and ended at 740 when I finished.) It took you 6 months to reach 200 and to reach 400 you may need about the same time. However, I believed you started somewhere at 200 to and that means you have done 0 progress in 6 months.

That is something that cannot be fixed by just a few words of advise. That is the main reason I created my prep course. Most people will be able to pass this exam with just some advise, but there is always a subset of people that can only pass this exam with thorough coaching and that is what my prep course is about. But it is your choice. It seems you need a lot of help to pass this exam and not just advise. I wouldn’t advise the Kaplan prep course as what they’ll probably do is just give you a bunch of books to read and lectures to listen to without teaching you how to study. USMLE PASS in Chicago offers some one on one coaching but they are very expensive. I think it’s about US$ 3K for 2 weeks and most stay for 6 weeks or pay around US$ 9K. The cheapest alternative will be to find a friend who knows how to teach you how to study and willing to sit down with you for 6 months.

If you want to understand why you need to know How to Study, listen to my video on How to Master the USMLE Step 1 – an Introduction. As I said most people can pass this exam without enrolling in courses. But you my friend may not be one of them. So you have a big decision to make.

Askdoc

please do reply soon..as i am counting my days..

Adnan

Thanks for your feedback. I sent you a PM and would be grateful to get your response as soon as possible given the next steps I decided on. Thanks again.

vimo

First, my advise is not to take the exam. You have a very good chance of failing it. Even if you are lucky enough to pass it, your score will be so low that your chance of getting interviews will be virtually nonexistent, especially with a previous failure. Postponing your exam for 3 months may not work either because from the look of things you are burnt out and have plateaued already. Which means that studying further will not increase your score by much. That is part of the reason why I tell people to finish your prep within 6 months as most people plateau between 6 to 8 months. When people have plateaued, the only solution is to stop studying for 2 weeks to 1 month altogether. (for some it can take 2 months to recuperate) then restart your prep. Usually you need less time for prepping this time around as you still remember a big chunk of what you have reviewed previously. All this is discussed in my prep course lectures and are some of the most common mistakes made by people prepping for Step 1.

As to why your score is low, I could think of a dozen reasons why you are having these problems but writing all that down will take pages. In fact those reasons occupy most of my live lectures in the course. But the single biggest reason is lack of mastery of the topics tested. Make no mistake, you know most of the topic tested in the USMLE, but you have not mastered those topics in the level required by the USMLE.

Is there a difference between knowing a concept and mastering it? Yes a lot. If you know a concept, given enough time and clues in the question, you can come up with the answer for the question. But given this is the USMLE, you do not have enough time nor enough clues. The higher your mastery of a subject, the faster you can recall them and the less clue you need to realize what the question is asking for and coming up with the answer. When you discuss questions with your friends, you take more than a minute to tackle the question and that means more time than the minute you are given in the actual exam. Second, unless you confined your discussion to the exact wording of the questions, you gain extra clues to what the question is all about during the discussion, hence you are able to get the answer. In the actual exam, you don’t get these extra time or extra clues.

That is part of the reason why I frown on this question discussion exercises in forums and do not bother to include it in my prep course. They just give you a false sense of security that your are improving when you are not.

There are a lot more reasons why you are having this problems including not assessing your progress regularly or properly, prepping for too long, prepping the wrong way, etc. All these are addressed in my prep course from the beginning so people do not waste so much of their time prepping the wrong way with adverse results.

After reviewing for so long, people always find it hard to accept that they have no choice but to restart their prep, correctly this time. In fact, some of them decides to proceed with the exam and failed it, which of course just makes it that much harder for them to match later on. Again, my advise is not to take this exam. Take a break for 2 weeks to 1 month. Restart your review, doing it the right way this time.

Askdoc

Based on your current performance, you are near your goal yet not quite. Based on NBME you will score between 225 to 235. Although you still have 30 days to study more or less, the problem is we do not know if you have plateaued. Plateauing means that further study will not increase your score and that happens to all of us. I suggest you continue covering high yield materials in your review in the last 4 weeks and taking it easy on the last week. Do not attempt to study additional low yield material just to boost your score as you seem very close to plateauing and doing that can lead to decline and that would be worse. Your plan seems good at this stage. Whether you can reach your dream score will depend on whether you have plateaued or not. extending study time will not help because it may even lead to decline and you will get a lower score than you have now.

So stick to the exam date, You have very good chance of getting a score in mid to high 90’s which is already very good. You have a fair chance of getting a 99 so it is not impossible at this stage. Anyway, good luck in your exam and make sure you read my post on What to do on the day of the USMLE exam.

Askdoc

First, studying too long is not a good idea. Of course studying too short is not a good idea either. There needs to be a balance. Getting the right balance is important but discussing all the details is too long to do here either. In my course, it is covered in the first 1.5 hour lecture, How to Master the USMLE Step 1 and discussed further throughout the course. Anyway to make the long story short. You need to cover a lot of material in the USMLE step 1. And you need to keep all of it in your head for that one day you sit for the exam. For the purpose of the USMLE, what you cannot recall during the exam and you have about 1 minute to do that, you DO NOT KNOW. It does not care if you have read it a hundred times. It does not care if you’ve answered thousands of questions in qbanks. Therefore, you need to be able to keep all those information in your head and recall them at the same time. There are methods that can help you do that.

In order to do this right you need a lot of time to study, learn and memorize the materials needed. But your biggest enemy is still time. Why, because immediately after you finish reading something, you start forgetting it. That is true for everyone, you, me and and every other person out there including people who gets double 99. Therefore the longer the total study time you invest into reviewing, the more you forget. That is the only results guaranteed. Whether you learn more with a longer studying time depends on a lot of factors, including studying things the right way. So it is a common misconception that you can study as long as you want to get a high score.

Everyone plateaus eventually. Where studying more will not increase your scores. In fact delaying the exam longer after you plateau will insure that you start declining and will actually score lower. Everyone plateaus eventually, some at 99, some at 85, some at 75. You just pray you don’t plateau with a failing score. Studying properly from the start can help you plateau at a higher score though, so it pays to have good study methodology and not just hit the books and read. Per my experience with people I have taught, most people plateau in 6 to 8 months so it is best to be ready to sit the exam by that time.

In your case, you might have plateaued and declined already, which is not good. My suggestion is this. If you still have unused qbank question. Do about 4-5 blocks, random, timed, unused, mixed. If your average score is equal to the UW average for the blocks. You have an even chance of passing this exam. which means your chance of passing is about 50-50. If you get about 5 points above UW average, you have a good chance of passing. If you get 10 points above UW average, you’ll score in the high 80’s. If you get 15 points above it, chances are you will score in the 90’s

Askdoc.