28/10/2024
الناس الممتحنة Step 1 قريب... ده واحد امتحن امس، وبتكلم عن الامتحان بصورة عامة...
Took the exam yesterday. My thoughts:
Hey everyone! After many setbacks and delays, I finally took the exam yesterday. Here are some thoughts and some assurances to those who might be stressed about it:
(Disclaimer: the examples that I'm giving are not actually exam questions. Its illegal to leak exam content as we all know)
1) When people say that the exam covers NBME content, they are absolutely right. I can say this with confidence because I have taken NBME 25 to 31 twice. I practically knew them by heart lol. I can say hand on heart that majority of the questions that I encountered were almost the exact same from NBMEs. I say almost because the idea was the same, just the words were changed. For example if a NBME question's concept is that H.Pylori causes MALT lymphoma, the real deal might ask you that a biopsy has been taken from someone's stomach, showing lymph node like structures with Germinal centres and increased lymphocytes; what was the risk factor for this condition? The answer would be: gram negative, Urease positive rods. Get it? Different words, yes, but same concepts.
2) THE QUESTION STEMS ARE NOT LONG: Yes, they are long... But maybe out of a 40 question block, at most, 7-8 questions are long. But in the same block you'll also fine 7-8 legitimate two/three liner questions that can be solved in like what, 10 seconds? So they equal out. The bulk, I'd say 70 percent of the exam, consists of questions that are very similar to the average Uworld question length, around 6-8 lines long, easily solvable in a minute. Which brings me to my next point:
3) Time is not as huge of an issue as people make it out to be: Yes, you may encounter a block in which the relative proportion of questions are longer, and takes more time, but unless you are being legitimately dumb in time management (i.e spending 6 minutes on a biostat question that you'll get wrong regardless), or losing concentration (which is itself a huge pandemic nowadays with the "scrolling/shorts era" of social media) I think you should never reach a point where time is so short that you have to quickly guess 4-5 questions at the end.
4) Difficulty level: Fair for the most part.
Yes, there are questions which are so p**s easy that I almost laughed as to what are these guys thinking. I saw questions that were as easy as, for example, asking me which vitamin deficiency is responsible for neural tube defects. Really? 😆. And then there were questions which were like super twisted and made very less sense. Or from concepts that I've never seen in UW, FA, or Pathoma. But again, these are outliers. 70 percent of the exam content, is fair. If you really know your s**t, you'll be doing fine.
5) Diagrams, Figures, Graphs, Histo slides:
You'll see these things. Frequently. And even though I had skimmed through HY NBME images, I saw mostly new (but reasonable) things on the exam. But it was again, fair. It made sense. Do not ignore First Aid figures!
6) MY MOST IMPORTANT ADVICE:
If I had a switch in my brain with 2 settings: "DUMB" and "OVERLY SMART", when I entered the test, I'd flick the switch to DUMB 80 PERCENT OF THE TIME.
Yes you heard that right. I have seen lots of Mehlman videos in which he says the same thing. In essence, he says that its a very bad idea to keep doing Uworld all the way to the end because UW trains your brain to be on the "overly smart" side when doing questions. WRONG MENTALITY. This has got me so many questions wrong on the NBMEs. He always says that in the last weeks, you must do NBMEs because NBMEs usually forces you to flick back to your DUMB settings.
In the real test, I'd chose something in the middle. But if I really was forced to choose on gunpoint I'd chose being a little dumb, and not overly analyze questions.
A personal story regarding this: almost 2 months ago, I took UWSA 2 and 3, scoring 230 and 241 respectively. I thought yeah, I think I'll be fine. And boom: 61 percent on free 120. It destroyed me. Why? I was using the "overly smart" settings. Took me a month to understand and apply the "dumb settings" lol. Be a bit dumb!
So yeah, these are some thoughts I have. Feel free to ask me and I'll try to answer as many questions as you may have. The test is actually easier than what you might think!
