Hello everyone,
Could someone please shed some light on my dilemma, I have done the uworld questions twice, reviewed FA once, my uworld scores are in the 70's but when I took NBME 11 I got a score of 160 which was so devastating, what am I doing wrong? Any advice will be welcome, thank you.

Hey,
First of all, don't stress it. It happens sometimes. I took a kaplan simulator after 2 solid months of studying and a 68% on uworld, timed, and I failed it miserably. I realized what I was doing wrong and it was me not answering the question based on what is being asked. I overlooked a lot of simple, obvious clues and it led to me over thinking the question. Ever since, my nbme's have been in the range of 230-236 (except for 11, I got a 211).

What did you feel was the reason to you performing poorly on the nbme? Did you have enough time per block? Did you change any answers? Were you able to eliminate answer choices? Were you marking questions? Were there questions that you just had no clue what they were asking? During uworld were you reading the explanation to the question and understand why the other options are incorrect?

I've come up with a few combinations in question stems that have helped me a lot in diagnosis. For example, every time I see "Immigrant with cough" I think TB. Every time I see "Immigrant child" I think vaccine preventable illness. Every time I see "whats the cause of death" I think cardiovascular. And, every time I see a question stem more than 5 sentences, I look at the last sentence, which tends to be an irrelevant question that you can answer without having to read the entire question stem, and see what it's asking.

PS: My personal experience with nbme 11 was that it was the most challenging for me. It was my lowest score, still passed it. Even though they claim they're all written on the same difficulty level, each exam has a tendency to focus on different topics, maybe a topic you're not strong in, compared to others, and that may have reflected on your performance.

The next post will be from some jerk claiming that they have THE SOLUTION to your study needs. Why dont we all call them and waste their time.
LET US ALL BAND TOGETHER!

1. We are stressed.
2. These guys are trolling our site
3. Theyre a low rent...low grade whore of a review course that wishes they could put together a better operation like BECKER.
4. CALL THEM EVERYDAY and WASTE THEIR TIME!

Thank you for your reply Mrsmail, now that you mentioned, I think I might have been overthinking the questions,during the NBME 11 test I realized I was also under the pressure of the clock because I barely finished each block on time. I have tried using another Qbank and my scores are now in the 60's, I'm also going over FA again just to solidify my knowledge, do you think this approach is good or should I just stick to uworld ? I think I know uworld so well that when I see the same questions asked in a different format I overthink it and choose the wrong answer. How do you think I should proceed ?

My personal take on the whole qbank is there's a reason why it's only 2200 questions; they can only ask the same stuff so many ways. I've spoken to many of my friends who recently took their steps and I asked them if they could do one thing different about their preparation, what would it be? They all said they wish they had kept doing questions despite them finishing the qbank at least once. One of them told me he had 5 questions that were almost the same as in uworld. Uworld qbank has similar concepts compared to nbme's, from my personal experience. The questions are just altered, but ultimately asking you the same thing.

From your response, it seems like you need to focus on your time management per question. Here's how I delt with that, maybe it'll work for you or maybe you can figure out a way that best works for you. I did uworld again but in timed mode. I tried to not spend more than a minute on each question. I would read and pick an answer. If I'm not sure about my choice or have a doubt between 2 answers, I would mark it and move on. I usually end up with 10-15 minutes to spare at the end of each block. In that time I would review the marked questions and ONLY change an answer if I can prove to myself why it's being changed. Otherwise, I stick to my initial gut instinct answer choice.

I've also learned that being calm is key in taking timed exams. Easier said than done, but nerves are a huge influence on your ability to focus. We're only human, and humans can only do so much. But, we can definitely accomplish a lot with so little.

Let me know if I can share any more personal experiences? I wish you the best!

Thank u Mrismail! U are a treasure! I applied your technique with the clock and realize I'm doing much better, I now finish the block with time to spare, I find that with the marked questions though my initial gut instinct was correct! I have tried resetting my uworld bank unsuccessfully , I reset it prior to my second review of the Qbank, does this mean I can only do random used questions now? Is there any way around this do u know?

No need to thank me. I'm glad you're doing much better!
In regards to resetting qbank, you can only do it once, which sucks. The best thing to do, if I were you, is just choose timed mode, all topics, all sub-topics, all questions. That way you can get the best simulation of a step 1 block. Increase sample size, more power! 'Increase' randomization, decrease bias!