Weigh your study time to “Get the Biggest bang for your buck”
- Review your baseline knowledge
- Disciplines You Rock:
- Disciplines that Rock You:
- *Disciplines include behavioral, biochemistry, embryology, microbiology, immunology, pathology, pharmacology, Systems (CV, endocrine, GI, hemoc, MSK, neurology, psychiatry, renal, GU, Pulm). Feel free to sub-divide or use your own categories
- You can also utilize question bank analysis to decide which disciplines are stronger than others.
- Time spent in disciplines that are more challenging to you naturally increase your score more. Additionally, conceptual and mechanistic understanding gets you more points than straight memorization of factoids.
- Association and key words are very helpful, which is why I recommend that you speed through your first pass of U-world Q bank and let your vast sub-consciousness do the background work of connection and association for you. However, when you zoom in on disciplines you need more honing on, you want to focus more energy on understanding principles rather than just memorizing.
Building practice blocks from ALL disciplines is more effective than doing questions in ONE discipline for an hour.
- Actual USMLE I blocks contain all disciplines, not just straight 46 cardiovascular questions. The more your practice blocks are similar to actual USMLE I, the more confident you will feel on your test day.
- Your efficiency and focus often peak during the first 10 minutes of starting on a new subject. So if you work on any subject continuously for over an hour, likely you are getting diminishing return.
Questions, questions, questions
- If you have one hour to spare, do a timed block over reading, looking at flash cards/cheat sheets, watching video, or sitting in lectures.
- Doing questions require active thinking and real-time learning; all other methods of test prep are passive, even to the most disciplined learner.
- Missed or nearly missed questions identify holes in your knowledge base.
- Why spend any time on what you already know? You need to know what you don’t know. Questions delineate the boundaries of your knowledge and the limitations of your thought processes.
- If you have little time, don’t resort to other prep methods until you have learned all you can from practice questions/answer choices/explanations available to you. More than likely, if you learned everything from ONE bank of 2000+ questions, you have gotten all you need to do extremely well.
- Timed blocks covering all disciplines benefit you more than untimed blocks.. They teach you to pace yourself and to maintain your poise and focus throughout the exam.
Ground Rules for USMLE’s Prep