Day 29 - It's Starting To Look Up + Practice Test #2
With 2 weeks to go, I feel like it makes more sense to count down than to count up. Letting the floodgates of stress open wide.
I did my second practice test yesterday, the NBME #29. I'm actually fairly content with the results. More on that later (scroll down if you want to jump to it). I want to first talk about how I decided to take my NBME exam and why it was so helpful.
✏️ Taking The Exam
I got this website from a friend that had all the NBME exams as PDFs for free. I ended up putting it on my iPad and going through the questions that way. I always wished I could annotate the UWorld questions and my rationale was that (for a practice test) it would help me correct the wrong rationale more efficiently. Even though I couldn't do it on the real test, I thought it would be very helpful in the current learning phase.
For every question, I would put a little note to myself if I didn't quite understand something, or if part of the question stem hinted at something. I would even jot down a word or two on why an answer choice wasn't wrong, in case I do get it wrong I would be able to tell why. For some questions, I'd leave a topic so that I knew I needed to revisit it.
It was very helpful, 10/10 would recommend it.
Here's a sample:
👀 Post Exam
I honestly felt a lot better about it than the UWorld both during and after the exam. The question stems were short, but they still tested a lot of reasoning. Plus, I wasn't bogged down by reading long paragraphs. I usually read the last sentence first, and for a few of them, I was able to pick an answer using just the last sentence. Huge win for the time.
I ended up finishing the sections with about 5 minutes to spare, which was way more than I had at the end of the UWorld.
My favorite thing about this exam was that I could delineate the things I don't know yet. Not the things I learned and forgot, but the things I never heard about. I felt that strange feeling of excitement again waiting to find out the answer because I was genuinely curious about what it meant. Eager to add to my growing Anki reviews. 🙃
Here Were My Results:
- Section 1: 56%
- Section 2: 64%
- Section 3: 58%
- Section 4: 64%
Total: 61% – I PASSED! 🥳 Barely... but still!
My Take:
I honestly liked the NBME version a lot better, when I went back over them today, I realized I had about 20 questions where I was between two answer choices. These are the questions I mark as "nearly there". Meaning that it was only details that held me back from getting those points, and that it would be the easiest to make up. (Hypothetically would have gotten a 70% if I got 'em)
I loved the clear distinction between the things I didn't know, and the things I did. The information I knew felt very helpful, unlike in UWorld where I felt like I knew exactly what they were talking about but would still get the answer wrong. I never quite understood what people meant by UWorld testing minute details until now.
Final Thought
Even though barely passing isn't quite the cushion I was looking for, with 14 days to go, I'm confident that I can make significant progress this week. I was able to go over a section today, and didn't feel like there were any big topics that I missed; just details and reading the question stems better.
Going forward, I'm going to focus on getting the most out of reviewing these exams quickly and taking ones more often.
I'll talk about how I structure my practice test days in another post, but for now, things are looking up and I'm grateful I'm able to share it with you guy.
Hope you're all doing well, and as always, good luck. ✌️
Random Thoughts:
- I realized you get to take longer than a 5-minute break between sections (which I did for the last one), and it's helped a ton.
- No big meals before/during the practice exam made my focus better than having breakfast. I now just eat two of these Belvita Crackers and some coffee.
- I've been feeling a little more pressed recently. Maybe it's cause I can see the finish line now, but I'm not sure how to deal with that feeling yet. More on that in another post.
- I honestly really love making the PopQuiz Instagram stories. Even though they take me hours to put together 🥲.
- Never realized how much back strain you can get from hunching over an iPad for 5 hours...not fun.
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