BOTH Qbanks

[MedBrah 19]

Almost done with USMLERx, Exams are in late June, thoughts on starting Kaplan this coming week and knocking in out in 30 days then going to UWorld for 2 passes?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[TheOther]

Almost done with USMLERx, Exams are in late June, thoughts on starting Kaplan this coming week and knocking in out in 30 days then going to UWorld for 2 passes?

That's fine -- just don't underestimate how long it takes to make the first pass through UWorld if you're using it properly.

 

[MedBrah 19]

That's fine -- just don't underestimate how long it takes to make the first pass through UWorld if you're using it properly.

Is April 15 - May 31 enough for one UWorld pass? Dedicated is May 1 - late June; so I won't be able to go hard on UWorld until May

 

[TheOther]

Is April 15 - May 31 enough for one UWorld pass? Dedicated is May 1 - late June; so I won't be able to go hard on UWorld until May

In my opinion, UWorld takes time to figure out. It's such a valuable resource that most people start off spending almost too much time on each question, but I think it's an important part of the process.

To finish the first pass of UWorld in 45 days, you'd have to average 55 questions per day going every day, no days off. To give you an idea of how long it took me at first (started UWorld in Nov alongside classes):

First 10% of questions: 10 questions, averaged 10-15 min each = ~100-150min. Started toward the 2.5h end and made my way to the 1.5h end over ~3 week period.

Second 10% of questions: 20 questions, averaged 8-10 min each = 160-200min.

Third 10% of questions: 30 questions, averaged 6-8 min each = 180-240min.

Fourth 10% of questions: 40 questions took me about 4 hours.

It now takes me about 3 hours to get through a 40 question block. Of course, the entire trend has been progressive in getting faster and the % and time are rough estimates. The total time spent includes searching/annotating FA, making Anki cards on marked/incorrects and watching relevant Sketchy (or at least looking at the image).

This is a n=1 but a lot of my friends would talk about taking 3-4 hours to finish a 30q block, working their way up to 40q blocks in 4h. It's not hard to find others on SDN/Reddit who say the same. So starting at 55q a day is going to take quite a bit of time, unless your knowledge base is solid as well as your familiarity with FA.

In my opinion, it might be best to ditch Kaplan and get started with UWorld, if your goal is to get through it twice. UWorld isn't the qbank you want to underestimate time-wise and risk barely getting through once. If you started now at 40 questions/day, 6 days a week, that's roughly 10.5 weeks.

Only my opinion though, hope others chime in to give more perspective. Best to you.

 

[Babou the Ocelot]

Agree with TheOther. My exam is mid-June and I just started UWorld last week (hoping to get through it twice). I just finished Rx (~2200 questions/6 weeks) and had already done Kaplan along with M2 systems, so I think I have a pretty solid base. It will take MUCH longer to do UWorld questions thoroughly, as mentioned above. I'm currently doing 40 question blocks, timed (1 hour), then taking about an hour to review them. That includes essentially skipping the ones that I felt very comfortable with and spending time reviewing the ones that I felt less than absolutely sure about. So even then, that's 20q/h max. You'd be hard pressed to get through Kaplan and UWorld twice before boards, and as such, you'd probably be better off just focusing on UWorld.

 

[MedBrah 19]

Okay thanks for the input guys, guess I'll ditch Kaplan and go straight to UWorld