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I am getting 55-60% on Qbank. Currently going over everything for 3rd time. To be honest, I havent studied more than 6h/day but have been studying since April. I need to score over 80 - going for FP, not ophthalmology. Is it realistic if I put my time in this month? Any good review tips? Especially for Biochem - that is the subject which brings my score down. Thanks.
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me too, one month to go and also targeting on mid-80s. From others' experience, it is really not secured to set a test when qbank is still below 60s. I am doing similar to you and trying to read more to get higher score
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Alright, here's my honest advice:
Start putting in more hours than 6 per day. You can do alot in one month. Many people across the nation do this thing in only 1 month.
Are you doing the questions in random blocks of 50 or are you doing it by subject? I recommend doing them by subject. It makes the review process much faster.
Spending a long time as you have allows the connections to be made, and for the material to sink in, so that's good that you've done that. However, with a month left, this will be the time you cram all the nonsense into your head. The trick is to know the junk well enough so that you can dumb it down to Step 1's level. The questions seemed to me to ask a lot of disease process. It helped to know everything about the diseases, but often that won't help you.
So don't worry about the Kraplan score. Do the questions to learn. Do 10 questions of a subject at a time. read the answers, both the correct and incorrect. The questions will take less time to get through, and the score on them will be meaningless.
Definitely work on your weaknesses if it is biochem, do more biochem. Honestly, the biochem on my exam was kind of easy. I had one question asking where NH4 entered the urea cycle. However, they gave me a diagram of the urea cycle with all the intermediates, and even drew boxes for mitochondria and another for cytoplasm... straight from first aid, page 164. It was ridiculously easy.
I also got a question about a kid who had Taysachs. They just wanted to know which organelle would be defective.
Another one was: which enzyme in liver mobilizes glycogen to glucose and is not present in muscle? First aid, page 167. "Liver acts like a muscle." The biochem really wasn't that bad.
Make sure your strengths remain strengths. Path and pathophys is always big on these exams. Physio was all up and down arrows. Behavioral science was tough becuase the scenarios of the doctor-patient relationship they gave were dumb. Pharm is all from First Aid. Memorize the key toxicities of the drugs. Ignore nonspecific side effects like "Nausea, headache, Gi upset" unless it is an idiosyncratic side effect of the drug, like a nitrate or something.
Spend some time reviewing key associations of various disorders. USMLE won't give you too many "buzzwords" as buzzwords, but instead will describe it. A Kaiser-Fleisher ring will be a picture of the patient's cornea for example.
I hope I helped somehow. Remember that First Aid is not enough if you memorize every word in it. No doubt that helps. However, make sure that when you run into a topic in First Aid, you can describe it and think about it in a different way. The topics in first aid are the highest yield review at this point, but try your best to go a bit deeper. Good luck
