Total card count would also be awesome. Granted, if he's just mentioning this stuff now to the team, most likely it won't be implemented in time for current M2s
Can you guys put together a list of the analytics you'd like to see (in order of importance would be great)? It's absolutely possible for us to get these in soon enough for you guys to get value out of them, but it would be helpful if you could give me a better idea of exactly what you'd like to see.
I think the biggest ones for me are total cards and % mastery
)? I appreciate you in advance! (@theKeithF I would love your advice too!)
I would not have flagged all of them at once, but that's me. If you put them as past, you'll never see them and presumably there are already 1000's of questions.Hey guys! I'm currently a M1 (in my 2nd semester) and I'm getting ready to start FC tomorrow. But I'm kind of confused about how to start. I actually signed up at the very beginning of med school but haven't really been able to start. That being said I have gone through and flagged all the topics that have been covered in my courses thus far (basic sciences, immuno, and some of GI). Should I not have flagged all of these? And if I am supposed to flag them, are they considered "past" since I'm no longer on those topics (I'm hesitant to do this because I remember very little from the topics so I feel like I need to review them/re-learn them)... Any experienced FCer willing to steer me in the right direction (I'm kinda intimidated about starting
If it were me I'd flag the current topics you're doing in class per usual, but in addition I'd flag 2-4 old topics per day but keep it "current". That way you still see that stuff. I realize other people would have different methods though. Plus you'll get the summer to catch up/get ahead, but I think for spaced repetition to work you have to have the repetition part. If you flag everything as past and you only see 50 past questions per day and have 1000's of cards to get through, you're not repeating those cards. Just my $.02
I'd second this.
When I tag old topics what level of topic do you suggest I use (for example, all of Anatomy vs Anatomy::Abdomen)?
Totally up to you. I felt at that point it was inefficient for me to do it. Instead I went through all my 1's, then all my 2's, and many of my 3's. Figured it was best to target my study at my weaknesses.
I'm still going to use it but may switch to work on my low numbers as abolt said. If we still had the never see this again button I'd probably continue as normal, but I don't need to see which roots feed the median nerve during dedicated.
3-4 topics, the smallest level. i.e. lower leg musculature, transcription, williams syndrome, microarrays, etc.Yes, this makes so much more sense than my approach! Thank you for your input!
Theoretically if you do 10%/week but you may hate your life and your retention will probably not be optimal. 10%/week will be about 200 questions per day. In order to retain those 200 questions per day you'll have to double that in review, so I'd say at least 600 questions/day if you want to have decent retention. It also depends how much you remember from classes.
I appreciate it, and may it serve you well! I can't believe you're waiting until August! You'll never get a 250!@Daitong @Ophthoseidon @theKeithF
huge thanks for all you guys/gals/whatevers that post in this thread. i start MC1 this fall and reading this thread today has been beyond insightful. already got services bookmarked and ready for purchase come august. i'll enjoy my summer until then, but once again, you all are doing a great service to us incoming students through your advice and discussions. it's greatly appreciated!
Learning goes like this for me:
I think 1's and 2's (maybe 3's) would be a far better use of your time at this point.
Not great. I am more liberal with my ratings. I'd say about 70-75%?
, I'm hanging out in the mid 60s. My goal is to get to at least in the 80s by test day, ideally 90% and 100,000 total reviews.
Dedicated for me is in about 3 weeks time and I'm sitting at 80% flagged
Hey there. Out of curiosity, where did you find these charts?Hey, I understand wanting to be farther with flagging than you are, but if you look at Fc's data I think you are still on track to kill it. Assuming you didn't flag another topic between now and Step 1, their data shows that the average score for your amount flagged is approaching the 250s. I say keep flagging and doing reviews and you're going to be in a great place to do really well in a couple of months.
It might be worth dedicating a few days to mass flagging so that you can get pass the flagging phase and have 1-2 months of straight review.
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I really only do it for the really short questions that if I just see again, I could memorize. I don't bother with the giant lists b/c I'd need to snooze like 3x to get the entire thing anyways.
I'd probably focus on flagging instead of qbanks if you're only 26% flagged. The quality is fine. They are very long winded, expanded questions but other than that they aren't bad
Depends on how your settings are set up, how many times you've seen the card before, and what you've previously rated a card. Also depends on how many other cards you have in your high priority stack. There are a lot of factors that go into the algorithm. In terms of reviewing, you can do directly to that subject section in study something specific to see the information presented on that topic.
Hey, I understand wanting to be farther with flagging than you are, but if you look at Fc's data I think you are still on track to kill it. Assuming you didn't flag another topic between now and Step 1, their data shows that the average score for your amount flagged is approaching the 250s. I say keep flagging and doing reviews and you're going to be in a great place to do really well in a couple of months.
It might be worth dedicating a few days to mass flagging so that you can get pass the flagging phase and have 1-2 months of straight review.
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Some things to note with these-- first, the guy appears to have analyzed the data using a few different regressions, each with only one variable, so you don't have nearly as good of a picture as you would have by including the other variables in the model (although, he might have used a model with all 3 independent variables in it, it just doesn't look like it from the presentation). This is important because the current influence of each variable isn't likely to be accurately estimated-- one variable may be more important than it currently appear or one might actually be pretty useless-- but we won't see this without the proper modeling. Second, The correlations are all relatively weak-barely moderate, and the R-squared values of those regressions would be even lower. In other words, the "# of recalls" variable accounts for about 13% of the sample variation (literally, square r = 0.357 to get ~0.13) observed in the STEP 1 scores, which means that there are a lot of other influences on your STEP 1 score (we have about 87% of variation unaccounted for by # of recalls). Lastly, you'll want to look at the prediction interval limits, rather than the confidence interval limits. In this regression context, prediction intervals are for one, single observation (i.e. the [hopefully] one time you take STEP 1), and confidence intervals are for the mean of all observations (i.e. if you took the test ad nauseam, your true mean score would be estimated by that confidence interval given a value for the # of recalls-- or this could be the true mean score for all test takers who had the same # of recalls). Why is that important? Well, look at the prediction limits... pretty wide. For example, it looks like for someone who does 4000 recalls the interval is about 215-265 or so-- doesn't look as nice as those confidence limits, does it?
Yeah, I didn't mean it in a bad way. I definitely agree with you that it's important to set those goals and using available data as motivation isn't a bad idea.
Hey there. Yesterday, we launched a huge update to Firecracker that introduced an entirely new mode specifically for this use case (i.e. dedicated prep during those last 30-90 days before board exams), which we're calling Dedicated Test Prep ("DTP") Mode. DTP Mode adjusts many of the core Firecracker experiences to better align with the way many of the most successful students prepare during their final weeks before boards, i.e. choosing a specific subject to study each day, reading through the subject matter either in textbooks or First Aid, and then answering test-style questions using some Q-bank like UWorld.
