So I'll finally cave in and post my experiences since I benefited greatly from those who posted before me. Like prevous posters, I go to a school with 1.5 years of basic sciences, so I had a year of clinics before I took the step. Whether or not this is helpful is debatable (and there's a whole thread dedicated to it), but imo I think it helped me. I have no scientific evidence on which to base this, but my score (at the bottom) was much higher than I anticipated.
Studying:
I took off a total of 8 weeks of school (no clinical obligations) to study. During the first week I read over FA 2007 and did one section of questions from each category in Kaplan Q-Book just to see what I knew well, pretty well, and had completely forgotten or never learned. I then spent the next 4 weeks going over all the topics covered by the step in more detail than what was presented in FA using several review books. I added lots of notes in FA. Starting ~3.5 weeks before the test, I began to use UW. Initially I was doing 50 questions/day untimed, random eventually working my way up to 150 questions/day. I read FA 1.5 more times, with the .5 accounting for the areas I felt weakest and had the lowest percents on UW. I finally took the test after 7.5 weeks of studying. I put in avg of 10 hrs/day. When I first started I was doing 6-8 hrs/day, worked my way up to 12hrs/day then back down to 8 hrs/day as test time approached.
Books:
FA 2007 - great foundation book, however doesn't connect all the concepts, which is important for those application questions; wouldn't rely only on FA
Lippincott's Biochem - I felt that Biochem was my weakest area, but this book is on the long end and you can probably get by with shorter books
Lippincott's Pharm - definitely overkill, but now my pharm knowledge has increased exponentially, now if only I can remember it for the wards, i'd be golden
BRS Phys/Path/Cell Bio/Behavioral/Embryo - Phys most helpful, path and cell bio less so, but still good books, behavioral and embryo overkill
Micro Made Simple - really good source, those silly mnemonics acutally stuck with me
HY Gross Anat/Neuroanat - gross slightly more helpful than neuro, but i guess i'm just not a fan of the HY series; probably other books out there that are better
Levinson Micro/Immuno - Just read the immuno part, which was good for me and actually contained many of the same diagrams found in FA with a little more explanation
Questions:
UW - started at 55% and ended with a cum. average of 76%, but my individual tests in the last 1-2 weeks were in the mid-high 80s
Test:
I slept for ~3 hours the night before...that sucked. Since it's been about a month from the date I took my test, I don't remember what percentage of each subject was represented. However, the things that stuck out to me include the majority of the test focusing on pathophys of all the systems, more images than UW (every 3-4 questions were associated with some kind of pic), and very little virology/parasitology. I was able to start my test early by getting to the testing center at 7 instead of 8. I took a break after block 2, 3, 4, and 6. I took 15 minutes for lunch, wasn't really hungry (I guess the anticipation of being almost done with step).
Score: I received my score exactly 20 days after I finished. 260/99...needless to say I was thrilled.
That's my story, feel free to PM me with any questions.
