I'll share my 2 cents, for what its worth. i just took the test today.
All i have to say is, you gotta read fast, and think fast, at 1 minute per question, cuz there are gonna be a few questions in each block that will take up that extra 10 minutes you're supposed to have left over.
i was hoping that questions would be 2-3 lines. But i got quite a lot of paragraph length questions with labs and ****, 50% i would say. You can't just read word for word. you gotta pick out the key words davinci code style.
a sh*tload of questions started with "The patient has shortness of breath", i swear. it was nuts.
Like everyone says, you gotta know First Aid inside out, to the point where hearing a word will trigger a mental image of the specific page number and paragraph (and image/diagram!!) in FA. Step 1 tests everything in FA. Most of the questions make you say "yeah, i saw that in FA somewhere. ****, where was it again.. ".
And for the pharm section, the question styles were like, "if the pt is taking this drug, which drug do you not give him, or what do you watch out for..."
Kinda tricky for me because I forgot most of the damn interactions and contraindications.
Books:
I only used one review book per subject during the school years. ranged from HY to BRS. and Lange for micro and pharm, which i read halfassed for both. I spent 80% of my total study time reading FA over and over and over, cuz you can't know FA cold enough, no matter how hard you try; photographic people excluded.
The last 2 things i touched before the test were FA and my BRS Path notes. There's so much random **** in FA that will give you bonus points at the last minute. You'd be stupid to be flipping through review books at the last minute.
One example of random **** is the 4-4-9 carb/protein/fat calories factoid. I got two questions on this ****, and i'm glad i read it in FA, cuz i totally forgot about it till 1 week ago.
Another random **** was the interleukins "hot like a t bone stEAk" mnemonic. One question asked about all that plus IL-8, which was not in FA, but you could eliminate all the rest that were in FA.
Overall, the questions were just like the NBME forms, except that the real thing has more lengthy questions with the junk interspersed in the paragraph.
