Post-Exam Musings

Post-Exam Musings

Ok, I’ve been done for about a week now, and I’ve had some time for reflection.

I walked out of the exam room thinking that the exam wasn’t too bad. To be sure, there were about 3-5 questions per block that I just had no idea about. I ended up being very liberal with my ‘marking’ of questions; maybe about 10-15 per block. These were distilled down to the 3-5 WTF questions that I just tried to make an educated guess on. So what else can I say? Let’s see…

Timing: I think I did Kaplan Q-bank the wrong way. Most of the time, I would finish a random block of 50 in less than 30 minutes, and I hardly ever re-checked a marked question. I also ended up marking over 800 questions as either incorrect or interesting - ie: I got it wrong, or I learned something new, and would go back and read them later – clever, right? Wrong. By the time I had finished Kaplan, there was no time to go back to these. Well, I probably could have, if it were not for an overwhelming feeling of wanting to throw the computer out of the window. After doing 2100 questions, you tend to get a little bored, frustrated, and lots of other nice adjectives that I can’t seem to conjure at this moment. Here’s the punch-line: Don’t do the questions at the last minute. Also, keep your number of resources low, don’t buy too many books, because you’ll never get through them all anyways.

Done!

Ok, just took the exam...I am so pooped I can barely type. All I can say right now is that it's not as terrible as I thought it would be. Overall I think it went ok. We'll see in 3-6 weeks I guess...

It's go time...

The big day is tommorow. I think I have a good plan going into the exam in terms of breaks but nothing concrete until the real thing I suppose (if you gotta go, you gotta go). I tried to spend some time going over some NBME's but it didn't really work...I just ended up watching TV and eating too much junk food. I think I'm pretty ready for this and surprisingly I'm not very nervous. Actually, more excited to be done than anything else.

Qbank Stupidity

I was 8 questions into a timed block of 50 questions today when the phone rang. Instead of suspending, I hastily clicked on END and submitted my score, which produced a score of 16%! CRAP. There doesn't seem to be a way to reverse this, and now my average has dropped 2%. I hate this...

NBME Time

Ok, everyone says the NBME's are good predictors for your real score. We'll see, because I'm starting them today...

Taussig-Bing!

Well, after 1450 questions of random 50 question blocks, the now infamous Taussig-Bing question has reared its ugly head. Naturally, I got the question correct. With 66% of Qbank done now, I'm at 73% correct, vs 62% for the rest of Kaplan users. My last 3 blocks were 76%, 76% and 92%. I also completed the end of book review in Robbins Qbook with 81%.