2ck UWorld questions have me going "wtf"? What to study?

[Dr McSteamy]

I haven't done any real prep for 2ck. I'm still going through my first reading of First Aid.
I just started to do a few UW obgyn questions to see how I stand right now.
I get 80% wrong. Just like random guessing. This is after I've read the obgyn section of FA.

When I read the answer, I ask- 'where the fk am i supposed to read about that? I never read about that??!!!'

Is this a normal reaction?

Are most of the answers supposed to be in step 2 secrets and FA etc?
I have finished neither book yet.


How do people jump from 40's to 60%'s on UW just by doing questions? Do you learn from the questions as you go, enabling you to answer future questions correctly?

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[CernerDrone]

FA's not that great. I would do the questions in UW on tutor mode untimed. Read the explanations for every answer, even the wrong ones. Then make notes of the main points of the question in the FA chapter. You definitely learn a lot and confirm what you know with UW.

Read Secrets once or twice the week of the exam (you can do this in 2 days).

Good luck!

 

[jdh71]

As mentioned previously just read the explanations to the questions. This is the best way to study. Keep taking the questions and be patient. It's freakin' February . . . you should be more worried about rocking the rest of your clinical rotations than your step 2 score at this point. PD's care A LOT about those scores and evaluations. Realistically you can do all the studying you'll ever need to for CK in about a month with the questions (you probably won't believe me, but I'm serious)

 

[Rogue_Leader]

FA's not that great. I would do the questions in UW on tutor mode untimed. Read the explanations for every answer, even the wrong ones. Then make notes of the main points of the question in the FA chapter. You definitely learn a lot and confirm what you know with UW.

Agreed, however I would suggest doing timed question blocks. For me, step II had more clock management than Step I. Where on step 1 I would finish each block with 5-10 minutes to spare, step II always came right down to the wire. It may have something to do with how the questions on Step II have long clinical questions, and less of the easy one liner questions (IE, "Which class of anti-hypertensive should you avoid in asthmatics?", etc)

 

[Dr McSteamy]

As mentioned previously just read the explanations to the questions. This is the best way to study. Keep taking the questions and be patient. It's freakin' February . . . you should be more worried about rocking the rest of your clinical rotations than your step 2 score at this point. PD's care A LOT about those scores and evaluations. Realistically you can do all the studying you'll ever need to for CK in about a month with the questions (you probably won't believe me, but I'm serious)

I'm not worried about clinical rotations, as they don't teach much.
Most of what you learn is in the books.

but what worries me is that after all this reading during core rotations, I should be able to score more than just 25% on UW, even if it's still feburary.

my next plan is to study the Indian way- read kaplan 5x.

 

[bananaphone]

I'm not worried about clinical rotations, as they don't teach much.
Most of what you learn is in the books.

but what worries me is that after all this reading during core rotations, I should be able to score more than just 25% on UW, even if it's still feburary.

my next plan is to study the Indian way- read kaplan 5x.

kaplan only five times? zomg, you desis are sooooo LAZY.

i liked learning by doing Qs on tutor mode. it was like a slot machine with a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. you click your answer and the outcome flashes on your screen immediately.

anyway...i have to agree with you on the wtfness of doing USMLEWorld questions after reading sections from a review book like 1st aid. i think a lot of it has to do with the how review books are so condensed. for example, the GI section in first aid doesn't even mention stuff like primary biliary cirrhosis or primary sclerosing cholangitis, yet USMLEWorld seemed to have tons of Qs on those two conditions.

don't sweat the OB/GYN. i was scoring low on my 1st 46Qs. i had only skimmed through the 1st aid section and had not even done my ob/gyn clerkship yet! when i had exhausted the OB UW q's i was scoring in the 80s. when i finally took Step 2 CK, i felt pretty comfortable with the ob/gyn questions. you really do learn via doing the Qs on tutor mode and referring to uptodate.com (or backdoor googling emedicine) liberally.

now, there is something else that will have you going WTF later on. that is when you have already done all the UW q's and are finally at Prometric taking Step 2. you will be asked about concepts not covered in UW. i think i even saw a few words or microorganisms i had never even seen before. for some reason i also had a lot of questions asking about MOLECULAR MECHANISMS of disease x, y, z. i seriously thought i was taking Step 1 again. and i was like, "WTF!?"

i guess my advice is to do all of UW, check out an appleton/lange Q book from your medical library, and then do UW again a little while latter. finish your pretests. the volume of questions you do really helps your test efficiency go up. you'll be able to answer a lot more questions via pattern recognition in 5 sec time rather than scratching your head for 3 minutes trying to reason mechanistically.

 

[FPLover]

The test is mostly internal medicine questions (45%) so I would make sure to have a source for that: Pretest, Case Files Internal Medicine. Also USMLEWorld. I would suggest 1 month prep, but if you have been doing stellar on your shelf exams you may need only 2 weeks

 

[Dr McSteamy]

The test is mostly internal medicine questions (45%) so I would make sure to have a source for that: Pretest, Case Files Internal Medicine. Also USMLEWorld. I would suggest 1 month prep, but if you have been doing stellar on your shelf exams you may need only 2 weeks

nope. i'm just an average student.

right now, i'm doing a block of GI questions, and my infinite limit (remember algebra?) seems to be 50%. man, i got a lotta work to do to reach 70%.

 

[Hard24Get]

How do people jump from 40's to 60%'s on UW just by doing questions? Do you learn from the questions as you go, enabling you to answer future questions correctly?

Hi there,

I can identify with your post. I also said "WTF?" when I started USMLEWORLD. But it helped me out in several ways:

1. I quickly identified my weak areas from the cumulative performance (I always did all categories together) and read up on those areas in Crush Step 2.

2. I read ALL the explanations, whether I was wrong or right (doing some in tutor mode helps with this as you get the explanation right when you were thinking about it but still get your score breakdown). And to answer your question - yes, UW does use their over 2000 questions to beat in concepts you need to know about, so you can do better as you go (ie, they will ask you the same thing in different ways if it is important). The detailed explanations also contain answers to future questions if you read them. I also made a habit of writing down everything I didn't know (which was a lot!) on a notebook so I could better imprint it and review it later.

3. UW is much harder than the real CK (which I just took today ), yet very accurate in terms of content, and the format is just the same as the test.

As Rogue_Leader says, it is important to do some timed, but I would do at least half on tutor mode since it is sometimes hard to read the questions in as much detail when you are re-visiting 40+ questions. I did about half and half, and finished each block today with at least ten mins to spare AFTER reconsidering my marked questions.

In conclusion, while UW initially makes you say, "WTF?", it is worth it, because I only said "WTF" on TWO questions out of 368 today