Day 21 - Dealing With Failure + First Full Length Results
So I took my first practice test today, and let's just say it didn't go so great. To put it kindly. My first reaction: drop out and become a TikTok influencer...but saner minds prevailed.
In an effort to maintain transparency, these were my results:
Even though I didn't feel too great going through the exam, I was secretly hoping I would pass somehow and that it would give me lots of confidence that I'm on the right track.
But, seeing the rank at the 9th percentile was incredibly disappointing. With three weeks left, I questioned if I would make it. Immediately after seeing it, I shut my laptop. I didn't even want to go back through the exam or see my results again because I felt so ashamed.
After a bit, as anyone would in this situation, I started browsing Reddit forums on what this means and if I would need to push the exam. I was looking for some validation that this was correctable.
To my surprise, others got similar scores closer to their date. That gave me a glimpse of hope.
I'm going to use this post to explain how I feel about it now after having sat with the results for a few hours, what I wish I did before, and what I'm going to do differently moving forward.
💭 My Thoughts About It Now
It's now been long enough that the shock of the exam has waned. I have gotten to look at some of the sections in the exam, and to be quite honest it wasn't as awful as I had expected.
During the exam, I consistently found myself knowing what they were talking about, but not knowing specifically the detail they were asking. For example:
(Spoiler Alert)
I know that the brain area they were talking about was Broca's area. I also knew that it had to do with speech. But there were two answers that referenced speech. I just didn't know explicitly which one. Ya know?
I also realized that I knew the majority of what the exam was talking about at one point. Whether the errors were due to not remembering the correct information, or forgetting key details, there weren't many questions where I was oblivious to the whole concept.
This gave me hope that this was correctable. I also realized that the pass percentage for Step 1 is around 60% or 196. I wasn't ridiculously far from that score. Specifically, not a distance I cannot bridge over the next three weeks.
😪 What I Wish I Did Differently
Although the content review I did was very helpful. It didn't give me the details I needed to answer questions. Specifically, there were two problems I ran into:
1) Inability to quickly associate symptoms with diseases.
There were several times when I knew that a sentence/phrase indicated a certain disease. I knew that phrase was important, but I just couldn't remember why.
Because my priority before was to go through all the material first, I didn't save enough room to go through the material that was "high yield" or "pathognomonic".
I forgot that the exam doesn't just test reasoning, it tests fast reasoning. So I needed to not just make those connections correctly, but quickly.
I genuinely feel like given more time, I might've been able to figure out more questions, but that's not an option. And doing more content review wasn't going to help with that.
The takeaway: I wish I focused on prioritizing UWorld Anki I've made in the past which trained me to make those quick connections.
2) Inability to correlate Sketchy Micro to clinical presentations.
While I had gotten through most of the Sketchy Micro. I didn't keep up with the reviews on my Anki consistently enough for me to quickly use that information.
I knew some details about a lot of the Sketchies, but it seemed like I never knew the specific thing they were referencing that well. I ended up still getting a decent score on Micro but in reality, I would've only understood the value of those details after doing questions like this.
For example, I might've known that the whip in the M. Tuberculosis sketchy was Cord Factor. But I wouldn't know its importance until applying it to a clinical vignette.
The takeaway: I wish I had spent more time going through Sketchy Micro at the beginning of dedicated / pre-dedicated, and doing more questions on it during the first week to cement the concept within a clinical vignette.
🤞🏽My Thoughts Going Forward
What I talked about in my last post still stands. I need to focus more on sticking to UWorld questions than trying to prep before them.
The experience makes me think of a story I read in a book a long time ago.
One of the potters had to make a new pot every single day, regardless of if it was the best yet or the worst.
The other potter had to learn as much as he could about pottery and the way to go about making it until the very last day, where he would use all the information he learned to make his pot.
Imagine who made the better pot after that 30 days?
While I say this, the truth is that I wasn't really following it. Honestly, I was really scared of seeing the low scores after blindly jumping into a random UWorld test, and internalizing the low score results.
I wasn't comfortable answering questions on material I didn't know, and I just rationalized to myself that it would be questions wasted if I did. Part of me understood that the questions are a source of learning, but I wasn't able to separate my self-worth from the percentage of a random UWorld block.
Accepting that feeling now, I realize that reviewing this practice test is going to be a much more efficient way of gaining more knowledge than going through old content.
🧘🏽 My Plan Now
My plan now is to focus on doing the Anki I've made for my old Uworld questions. I'm going to try to add practice tests (NBME ones) more frequently, and do UWorld blocks to fill the gaps in the middle. (I said more about it in yesterday's post)
I'm going to gauge whether I need to push my exam or not based on the next UWSA exam (UWSA2) I'll take in a few weeks.
✌️Final Thoughts
As much as I'd like to say this exam didn't affect me, it did. I guess that's just part of the process though. I'm glad I got this reality check while I still have time to course correct, and it's not too late.
If you're in a similar boat, I guess what I want to say to you, and what I'm saying to myself is that the results don't define you. Failure is a part of life, especially in Medical School. Trust me they suck, but I personally believe that our failures would suck a lot more if we never learned anything from them.
If you're with me on this journey, let's use this as an opportunity to learn and figure out how we can get better moving forward. Until then, good luck. ✌️
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