CBSE - AMBOSS worth doing?

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carabelliscusp

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Anyone whose taken CBSE and done well have any input as to this? Surprisingly hard to find a good answer on it. Finished up Uworld today (48 days out) so far scores are:

61% UW Qbank
224 UWSA1
68% NBME20
70% NBME21

Plan on finishing all other NBMEs but that still gives enough time to potentially hit another Qbank. Was thinking AMBOSS during dedicated 1 month over the summer.

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could always do a uworld second pass
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After seeing this from a Step1 survey from 2018 on Reddit, I wasn't planning to. Seems like no correlation between repeats. I'm not opposed to it, just didn't seem evidence-based and I see a lot of mixed opinions
 
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Going through your incorrects is nice because it is only grilling you on questions you didn’t know before. Starting a new question bank is going to be a lot of questions you already know the answer to.
 
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Going through your incorrects is nice because it is only grilling you on questions you didn’t know before. Starting a new question bank is going to be a lot of questions you already know the answer to.
Interesting perspective. You did a second pass like that I'm assuming?
 
I don’t know a single person who has used AMBOSS. Nothing against it. Just the facts. UW - one pass, followed by an incorrect/flagged pass seems to be most common and effective method
 
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Back in the day, when UWorld was like 1600 questions, the dean at my med school said they told everyone to do 2 passes through UWorld. Now that it's like 3600 questions, she said people have a tough time doing 1 pass.

I think if you did Uworld over like 6 months (or longer), there's some value in doing it again or at least doing your incorrects. Keep in mind, a lot of people used to save UWorld until dedicated and then do it twice in a 2 month span. Doing it twice in such a short time period has diminished value because you remember a lot of the questions.

As for Amboss, I didn't use it for step 1, but we were given Amboss and UWorld for Step 2. From what I've seen on Reddit, Amboss is solid for step 2. I'm sure for step 1 it must also be pretty good.
 
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I did Uworld on random in 2019, I had a weak base and it felt like I was treading water. I then proceeded to do Amboss by section while reviewing first aid, I was able to make many more connections and ended up really happy with my score. Your stats are quite good, but it could help you make a big jump if you have enough time.
 
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Amboss for step 1 can sometimes get too picky in their questions and ask things that’ll probably never be asked. I think they miss the forest for the trees in some topics and others I’ve spoken with agreed. UW is better but amboss is still good. Just a personal preference I’d think. Agree with above stuff tho - do UW incorrects as priority
 
AMBOSS was a great first question bank to use when doing content review. The ability to click on most terms and have definitions pop up and full pages from their library to help explain concepts was really useful. Their 4/5 hammer questions were unnecessarily difficult.

That being said, as I go through UWorld it feels like a higher quality Q Bank.

I’m going to prioritize UWorld and going through all of the NBMEs again to make sure I’m understanding what and how they test.
 
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UW is great to learn but NBMEs are most similar in question style. Use UW to learn and NBMEs to practice and simulate test day
 
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