School of Medicine

Andrew Moriarity, Class of 2009

General Recommendations

• This is not the most important test of your life. It is however another hurdle that you must clear. All it’s asking is, “How badly do you want this?
• The “daily schedule” is just to give you an idea of how everything should flow once you get used to the timing, make up you own if it doesn’t work for you.

Tips & Tricks (doc)

• How was my First Week?
  • It sucks, plan on spending 4-5 hrs reading the Kaplan books and only a little while actually doing questions
    • Doing questions early on also sucks because you’re basically reviewing everything, so going over the answers takes forever
    • I never had trouble getting through the Qbank questions in under 1min/question, but reviewing just 25 questions could take up to an hour afterwards
    • This of course got MUCH better as the time went on; you start to recognize disease/patients/patterns more easily, you get more questions right and you need to spend less time looking up stuff you got wrong/annotating first aid with missing facts; it may sound like common sense but you actually start to think like the test (i.e. the ideal physician) the more you study and do questions
    • Biochem really sucked, but that might have just been the first day of it all; Molecular & Cell Bio was much easier/productive
    • If you can’t realistically absorb as much material as is packed into the first week, then don’t try.  Give yourself a few extra days and either cut down on break time or the review week.  This material is lighter on the boards than pathophys, but it’s still very important to know if you want to do well.
• How did I study the Pathophys Section?
  • Once you’re in pathophys the reading sections are shorter, so you should finish reading before lunch and start doing questions in the afternoon
    • It took me about an hour to really read 20-25 pages of Kaplan, and probably about an hour to read 20 pages of First Aid (again, at least initially)
    • You could probably burn through renal, heme, endo or reproductive in one day eacg if you want and pick up time (or earn another day off, whatever)
• Pros About the schedule.
  • (ie, if you ignore the whole hellish “basic sciences” week)
  • You build up the reading/question ratio just like Kaplan says to: the first week you read way more than you do questions, then during the patho two weeks you do about as much reading as you do questions, and finally the last week(ish) you do way more questions and just review (no new material)
  • You have a built-in free/review day after each of the three “sections”; this allows you to review if you’re caught up but also gives you some wiggle room if something comes up (or you simply don’t get everything done one day and fall behind)
  • There is still enough time off at the beginning and end to have sort of a resemblance of a real “break”
  • There are some built in break times (designated free days not for review that you can move whenever) to keep you from going mad
• How did I review Human Anatomy?
  • Every time there was an anatomy question (or even something that had an anatomy aspect) I brought out Netter; seeing it again can’t hurt
• What do I need to pass Step I?
  • Pretty much all you need to pass Step 1 is in First Aid.  I realize that’s a pretty bold statement, but it comes with some qualifiers
• #1: Not absolutely everything on Step 1 is in First Aid, but at least 85-95% of it is (and lets be honest, 90% is probably an unattainable score)
• #2: First Aid won’t teach you what you don’t already know, you need Kaplan/BRS/etc for that
• #3: First Aid won’t tell you what you don’t know, especially if you just keep blindly reading it; you need questions for that
  • A good exercise is to take a notecard and cover up everything except the heading in First Aid sections, if you can spout off most of the information that is beneath the card without looking then why are you reading that page?  You already know it, so move on to something else.  On the other hand if you just read the same thing over and over there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually remember it on the test.
• #4: First Aid uses  all the “buzzwords” but Step 1 is cutting them out; take this as an opportunity and annotate any “buzzwords” that you don’t immediately know with their actual descriptions (e.g. can you describe what a “starry-night” looks like?  What about a Negri body?  Lewy body?)
• #5: There isn’t any fluff in First Aid.  Not a single word is in there that wasn’t intentionally selected and then refined.  You can’t skip over reading a sentence or two like you can a normal textbook (especially if you want to try and argue with me later that something on your test wasn’t in First Aid)
• What are some "key points" to success?
  • In my opinion the most important thing that you can do in order to succeed on boards is to make sure you don’t get in your own way, for example:
    • Do the things you hate.  I really hated reading, I loved doing questions because they gave me instant feedback (“Hey, look I am above 60% now, that’s better”) and I didn’t even mind reviewing the questions (“Oh, I get it now”).   I made sure reading & first aid got done everyday, even if that meant I ended up doing fewer questions and took longer to finish Qbank than I wanted to
    • Identify your weaknesses early, and then make sure you correct them.  Right out of the gate I knew I was going to struggle with pharm & micro.  I did well in the classes, but the way I studied pharm, and the time since micro really put a damper on my retention.  I went out and bought flashcards the day before I started studying, and went through them a number of times after I finished studying & doing questions for the day.
    • Find a way to get comfortable.  For some reason I was all worked up about what the actual day would be like.  It’s an alien environment and you never really know what to expect in situations like that, especially when you add in what a stressful day it’s going to be no matter how prepared you are.  Now I didn’t want to waste time/money doing the practice exam at the center, but it turned out to be a good investment for me personally because it really helped me to feel in control of the situation.  It was more familiar on test day and thus less anxiety provoking.
    • Review to learn.  When I reviewed practice questions I would often find ones that I had made just stupid mistakes on.  After taking a second to curse myself out, I always asked “Why did I make that mistake?”  Identifying if you’re just skipping important parts of a question, not picking up on key details, rewording the question/options to answer a question that wasn’t asked or just getting flustered and not recognizing something you should are all key things that you can fix if you start catching them early and thinking about them when you practice.  The habits will become ingrained so that you don’t have to think about them on test day, you’ll automatically stop yourself from making stupid mistakes without having to think about it.
    • Always make the content your own.  Rephrase the question as you are reading through it.  I tried to reduce all the questions to one or two short sentences when possible, this made the question seem less intimidating and also helped me orient it in a way that was more familiar to my way of thinking.
    • Always have an answer BEFORE you look at the options.  The question is written so that if you were an expert in that field, you wouldn’t need any options.  As Daugherty says: “The question is your friend, it’s there to give you the answer; options are your enemy, they’re there to confuse you.”
• Q-bank?
  • My impressions of Q-bank: biggest ego-bruise ever but a pretty fair mix of questions, use it effectively and you can seriously help yourself
    • Difficulty: it’s hard to say for sure, I would guess that questions where >70% of people get it right could be considered “easy”, between 40-70% would likely be a typical “boards question”, <30% is a pretty difficult question (but remember, boards will probably have a fair mix of these types as well)
    • IV Qbank seemed much easier, I only did about a quarter of it before letting it fall by the side in favor of Qbank but some people really loved it
• Theory on learning?
  • Personally I feel that you need to read over something at least 3 times to really have it down, so I read First Aid cover to cover 3 times.  Some people learn better in groups than I do, so I stayed away from them during my prep, but I am a firm believer that anything you say or discuss in a group has a higher chance of being retained in your memory on test day.
  • I took my test a week early because I wanted some vacation time.  I don’t think it hurt me, however some of my friends took it a week later and did do a few points better than me.  Maybe time had a factor in that, but I can’t say for sure.  Boards are just all about time, and how much you want to put into it.  That being said, I think the test does a pretty good job of tracking how well you learned first and second year material.  So if you struggled more than you would have liked, you will probably have to put in a little more work if you want to do better than your personal average.
  • The day before the test:
    • I actually took this day off, much to my surprise and I think it worked out well.  Do something to keep yourself active mentally and physically, have a good dinner and get to sleep at a reasonable time.  There’s no sense in working yourself up into a panic the day before the test.
  • The test day itself:
    • Pretty much the craziest experience I’ve ever had in my life, and that’s all I can really tell you about it.  I know that I went to take the test, but I honestly remember very little of it.  I remember feeling anxious but confident when I arrived.  I also remember feeling like I totally failed the first block and having to leave the room to compose myself.  The rest of the day is a blur consisting of thinking that I didn’t even know half the questions in every block, feeling light headed once or twice, a short lunch outside in my car listening to music and the distinct feeling that as I left the testing center I needed to start considering other careers.  I believe my first words to my parents were “I am pretty sure I failed”.  In the end I didn’t fail, I actually did quite well; but it sure didn’t feel that way when I left.  Also remember that most people look at their score once it arrives and say “if I just had 5 points more, that would be great.”  I’m telling you this because these are not uncommon feelings to have after such a trying experience and you shouldn’t let them bog you down, especially once you pass!
    • Also the place can get noisy and very warm once people start showing up.  Bring some earplugs, I doubt you’ll need a sweater after 10am.
    • The only thing that I didn’t end up doing on my schedule was a day (or two) of 300(ish) questions to simulate the exam experience.  I’m not exactly sure if it would have helped, but I don’t think it would have hurt.  Even after doing the practice exam, I don’t think I was totally prepared for the mental struggle that was Step 1.  Maintaining focus on the questions for around 8hrs is a real chore, especially if you believe that you’re not doing well.  I’m not saying that you should spend a day just doing questions if you’re pressed for time, but if you have a day to spare and want the practice then it’s probably worthwhile.
• Wrapping it up.
  • Ok, I think I have fun out of things to say (even though I could probably go on for a few more pages).  The most important thing is just to keep yourself focused.  Pick a score that you want to beat, and always keep it in mind.  Take some time to relax so you don’t go crazy.  Make sure you leave yourself enough time to be ready to start YR3 once it’s all over.  And of course if you ever have questions about something, make sure you ask someone who’s done it for advice.

BEST OF LUCK!

• Disclaimer:
  • You may have noticed that Mussman came up with the Kaplan based study plan that’s been pass down by a lot of WSU students over the past few years, this is just a differently organized version.  If you don’t like reading large amounts of text then you may prefer to find a different schedule that uses the BRS or the Kaplan White/Blue books, which are more of an outline form and less information heavy.  The claim is that if you follow Mussman, then you’re not going to score below a 240 and that several people using his schedule have cleared the 260 mark.  I know a few people who used his schedule this year and the scores ranged from 225-255, so take your pick.