I'm absolutely horrible at these Step exams. I don't feel anxious while taking them, not sweating, tachy or anything like that. I took about 3 weeks total for studying for Step 3. At first it was rather sporadic reading Master the Boards and doing questions with UW. However, I spent 8 days straight busting out random 48q blocks with UW. I averaged 58% in the end. I actually felt pretty decent going into the exam. I walked out thinking I did quite well. I finished all the blocks in time and was always able to eliminate my choices down to 2 on questions I absolutely didn't know. My cases were rough but got through them with only 2 total disasters. The Bam! Fail. I just don't get it. Needless to say I'm devastated. I have to go through the preparation all over again and don't know what to use. I fear UW will be repetitive but really haven't heard to many good reviews on Kaplan (for Step 3 at least). More disappointing, I'm in family medicine so I've had consistent exposure with peds, OB, cardio etc. Any advice out there? Need an attack plan. Help please. Thank you.
You probably aren't getting much advice because:
1. This board is slower than the other step-related boards.
2. Some of the people who view this thread are possibly people who have never taken Step III, but are looking ahead towards taking it.
3. There's only so much information in your thread to really work off of.
Addressing the second point, I haven't taken the Step III yet, nor have I really started any studying for it yet. I'm probably not the best person to be giving you advice, but I'll at least offer you some general advice that should hopefully work out to your advantage.
Addressing the third point, I think you need to assess where you feel you may have gone wrong in order to create a more focused plan to try again. There are lots of ways to fail an exam, and it's not all that helpful to go "I don't know what I did wrong. I felt like I did everything right, but failed." Maybe three weeks of sporadic reading MTB was not good enough. Maybe you should study to the point where you
are a little nervous about the outcome of the exam. Maybe you should spend more than 8 days on UWorld, and in particular understand why you were missing the questions you were. Maybe you need to focus more on making the CCS more comfortable than "rough, with only 2 disasters" (what to study for on those, I'm uncertain at the moment -- Dr. Red's seems to be popular, as is UWorld's CCS practices).
I think you'll be surprised with how much you don't remember when you do UWorld again. By all means you should try it again.
And when you eventually do take the exam again, you should try to have an idea of where about you might land. Aim well above the just passing. I notice that people tend to fall just short of their goals. So if the goal is just passing, the result is just failing. Aim higher for like 10 points above the average. You might not get it, but you'll be more likely to do the bare minimum of passing.
