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From:
Date: 05 Apr 2005
Time: 14:15:12 -0400
Remote Name: 192.30.202.28
Greetings, I took the Step 1 exam last Friday, after 7-month preparation, so it’s my turn to share experience. Let me start with the acknowledgements. I’d like to thank my wife for her guidance and absolute support in my studying (she took the boards two years ago and now she’s working hellish hours as 1st year resident); my mother-in-law who took care of the kids while daddy studied; and my two children (10 and 2) for their patience and understanding. Least but not last, I’d like to thank all my friends in this forum for the great discussions, exam experiences and support. There was nothing special in my preparation, so briefly I took Kaplan 30-day center prep, Q-review, First Aid and Goljan’s audios. I did two reviews of Kaplan except for Pharmacology and Microbiology which I read once. My assessment scores were not very impressive, a mix from mid sixties to low seventies; 520 on NBME 1 – one month before the exam. I approached this exam as a challenge to my abilities and a good opportunity to review the basic science, so I was motivated and confident in my success during the entire studying. I enjoyed participating in variety of discussions until I realized that this is taking too much of my time and significantly distracts me. Sorry to say that but that was the main reason I stopped posting few months ago. I read many exam experiences over the last six months, so the main message I got was that the exam is reasonable and doable. Now after taking it I can only confirm that. However I should say it’s doable but it still requires a significant preparation, especially for old grads (I’m ’95 grad from Bulgaria) and people who studied medicine in a different language. I studied the entire day before the exam. The day of the exam I had a light breakfast and a coffee, I drove 30 miles to the test center, got there one hour earlier (was afraid of heavy traffic), so I studied during that hour as well... I entered the exam very tensed, however my first 10-15 questions were piece of cake so I quickly relaxed and concentrated on the test. My major problem during the test was the time management and of course an exhaustion for the last blocks. OK let’s move to the HY part - the exam content. Please note that all estimations I’m going to make are very rough, they are highly subjective and are based strictly on the materials I used in my preparation: Kaplan and FA. * Kaplan's lecture notes have 90% of the information needed to answer all question. Watching the videos helped me to identify the HY topics and to understand the basics well. Some of the videos are really good. I enjoyed Biochemistry, Behavioral Science and Anatomy the most (how did I measure it?: I was absolutely alert watching these lectures, it was fun listening to them, HY points were well emphasized); Physiology, Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology were OK (I got sleepy some time, it was hard to concentrate), Pharmacology was the worse (I got almost nothing from those lectures, felt asleep few times). * FA has condensed HY content and it is excellent source for a rapid review, but not for studying. It has some HY topics that are missing in Kaplan. For first time I discovered the mnemonics as a way of remembering, some of them I found excellent, other really stupid. * Q-bank adds HY topics to the Kaplan lecture notes. Perhaps it is the most flexible to update resource, so it should have all new HY’s. I think that is an essential tool for the success on this exam. Please don’t waste your time with fake Q-bank on CD. The value that you get from the real tool is absolutely worth the price. Sharing Q-bank is not a good idea if you wish to use all its features. Q-bank has problems as well: it does a poor job of mixing questions from different subjects; the questions from some subjects were exhausted very early from the “unused” pool; the majority of the questions are shorter that those on the real exam; reviewing incorrect questions is a pain in the neck. * IV Q-bank is not an essential tool. You may get it if you have extra time and money, and/or you want all Kaplan’s bells and whistles, OR if you want 6-month access to Q-bank (Q-review is cheaper than 2 x 3-month-Q-bank). * NBME is highly recommended. I got at least 3-4 NBME 1 questions on the real exam (I did not have time to do NBME 2). It also gives clues on the recent HY’s. However I think that at average the NBME 1 questions are shorter compared with those on the exam. * If you get Q-bank do the simulated exam that comes with it (this is a different test than the one on CD). It is a tough exam and I think that is the best Kaplan’s simulated exam. The distribution of the questions among the subjects matched to a high degree what I got on the real exam. The length of the questions corresponds and it is even higher than average length of the real exam’s questions. I got only 64% on that exam, after not being able to work on 10% of the questions due to time managing issues. I acknowledged my timing problems and made some corrections to my strategy for the exam, however I underestimated a little bit the clear message of that simulated exam: it had 88 pharmacology questions and in fact pharmacology was heavily tested on the real exam. * Goljan audios are excellent. The quality of the sound is superior so I think they were professionally made. So I wonder how and why they leaked from Kaplan... I recommend listening them after reading all the subjects and viewing many slides. The lectures are not accompanied by the original slides, so you really have to know what he is talking about. Unfortunately those are no longer available on coolgoose.com, where I got them from. (Please don’t ask me to send you those lectures. First of all they are huge files, secondly they are copyrighted materials, and we certainly are not anonymous users of this forum). This writing became quite long. Let me stop here for a while and I’ll continue later with more detailed information about the exam itself…Thanks for reading, I really hope that this information will benefit your preparation. Chav