![]() Some people went through this Q Bank twice. I don’t recommend that, but if you find yourself in a similar situation, know that it’s possible to do well without finishing UW! Just make sure your practice exam scores are in a comfortable range. I had a little less than 200 questions left unfinished. ![]() Yep, you read that right, sorry if it gives you a little anxiety (it gave me a ton). Make sure you stay DISCIPLINED and do at least 40 questions per day! Do NOT get behind like I did (see above) because doing 120 questions per day on your first and only pass through UW and knowing that you won’t even get through the entire Q Bank is NOT fun to say the least. Towards the end of my studying, I was moving even faster and often did not use up the whole 4 minutes per question. Understand the overarching concept (should be able to summarize in 1-2 sentences), why you got the answer right or wrong, and move on for the love of all that is good! After realizing I needed to do this, I used the app Activity Timer on my MacBook to time myself for each question (I gave myself 4-6 minutes per question, 4 min was in the last couple weeks). The trick is to make sure you understand the explanations for the right and wrong answer choices, but not to dwell too much on the tiny details (at first I tried to write down/memorize everything for every explanation for every question. When I first started UW, it took me 8 hours or more to get through 40 questions. ONLY make cards for the questions you miss. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND making Anki cards as soon as you start UW – I didn’t and I really regretted it. ![]() I also made Anki flash cards for each question I missed, and though I didn’t have time to go through them, just making the flash cards helped AND I had notes I could search through when I forgot something later on. The key to successful learning via UW is to have a thorough understanding of every explanation (both for the right answer and for all the wrong answers), and make sure you’re thorough with every question regardless of whether you got it right or wrong. UWorld was my NUMBER ONE resource – actual gold! I increased my score by 35 points in a single week from simply doing 40 UW questions a day. I ended up being 2 weeks out from my exam with only 27% of UW completed and way too far from my goal score. I was trying to memorize every detail my first pass through, and that was the single greatest regret of my first two years of medical school. I got off the train a bit in the beginning because I felt like I needed to read First Aid for all the facts before I could start questions, and it bit me in the behind! I went through FA extremely slow, sometimes taking an entire day to get through half a chapter, not having enough time to even touch/look at any other resource. If I could go back, I would probably have started studying 2-3 months in advance, but hindsight is 20/20. I’m a pretty quick learner and I knew that I had learned the material well during my didactic years, so I didn’t feel like starting before dedicated would’ve been beneficial. Keep in mind, this is what worked for me, and what works for one person may not be what works for you. But I found that studying for this exam is about efficiency and studying smarter, not studying longer. On top of that, the score I got on the school-administered practice exam was just almost passing. This was a source of stress for me when the time came because I started to feel like I wouldn’t be able to achieve my goal with so much less prep time, especially when all my peers could talk about was what they were doing to study. I didn’t start studying for Step or COMLEX 1 until six weeks before my exam date, contrary to popular advice and what most other people did. And here’s me telling you that you can do it too. So here’s mine and just what I did to achieve it. I read success stories every night when I felt hopeless and it helped me hold onto the hope that I, too, could be a success story. I’m writing this because reading these kinds of posts was literally the only thing that got me through studying.
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