Scored low on CBSE, do I have a chance in February?

[dentalchamp98]

Hey guys,
So in July I scored a 39 EPC on the CBSE. This was with about 5 months of studying using Anki, medschool bootcamp videos, and completing around 40% Uworld. I will be honest, I didnt give it my all but I also felt like during the exam, I was blanking out on things that I did learn during my studying. Moving forward, I think I will not use anki as I am the type of person who needs to understand the material and not just memorize certain facts. I spent hours just going through about 300 cards a day trying to grasp the material. I am a D3 so I'm very busy with clinic and so with that said I am wondering if I have a chance to increase my score in February and if so, what would be a good way of doing it? Thank you

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[carabelliscusp]

You have a chance but that's quite low. What was your uworld average? Take any nbmes?

 

[dentalchamp98]

Uworld average was around 30%, did not take any nbmes

 

[Gustavo dos Santos]

A 39 EPC signals to me that you did not have a grasp on the big-picture material. And a 30% average with 40% done with UWorld tells me you weren’t really learning from your mistakes either.

I think you need to revise the material again. I would try a faster resource, like Pathoma, and focus on understanding the material. You’ll need to memorize a bunch of stuff, but you also need to have a working knowledge of concepts because come test day there will be stuff you’ve never seen and you need to be able to reason through everything.

For example, the coagulation cascade. Being able to walk through intrinsic/extrinsic pathway, what triggers them, which factors they rely on, where the factors are made, how vWF plays a role and which factors it interacts with/where it’s made and stored, and how a defect in a factor changes the bleeding time/PT/PTT are all things that I wouldn’t list as “memorization”. You need to learn the concepts, but it’s all fairly intuitive. That’s all working knowledge that should allow you to reason through a question about a person who has elevated PTT and whose blood still doesn’t clot when mixed with factor viii. Using an anki card to memorize that hemophilia B is a deficiency in factor IX won’t get you that question right. The working knowledge does.

You need a baseline working knowledge to then add all the stuff you have to memorize on top (factors affected in Bernard-soullier, glanzmann thrombasbthnia, hemophilia).

Focus on big picture stuff, because with big picture knowledge you should be able to get closer to mid 50’s-60. Then add in the details.

With micro/Pharm I’d use sketchy and I’d use anki. I thought pepper micro and Pharm was sufficient. Everything else I picked up through questions or just reviewing the sketches again on their own.

You also need to do as many NBMEs questions you can get your hands on. See the pattern of how they ask. How they present certain diseases, or words they use for certain conditions. UWorld is good to learn, but it’s different from the CBSE style questions.

When you get something wrong on UWorld try and quickly determine why you got it wrong. Did you misread the question? Did you not look at all the answers? Did you correctly identify the disease but then just didn’t know that last final detail? Did you have no idea what was going on? This will help you figure out how much time to spend reviewing that Q. When I reviewed I would try to make sure my big picture knowledge and logic was sound, and then add to the logic if possible (what’s the next step that would’ve allowed me to get the question right) or make a note of the additional info I didn’t know and try to review/memorize it again later.