12 WEEK STEP 1 STUDY STRATEGY/SCHEDULE Required tools: à Academy lectures à Academy quiz book à USMLE World question bank. The strategy: The way we will approach the exam prep this time is by combining the lectures with the quizzes initially, then once you have been through it all, then we will go full-‐force with the UW questions. The quizzes are extremely important because they reinforce all of the highest yield pieces of information within each lecture. I want you to take things a step further by having Q&A sessions each and every day, for a minimum of 30 minutes! Hopefully you have someone that will be willing to sit down with you and drill you with questions from the quiz booklet. You won’t start the Q&A sessions until finishing the first topic completely (Genetics), but once you have finished that component and done the quiz, you need to be performing daily Q&A sessions. Before beginning, you should perform an NBME exam to determine where you are strong, average, or weak. If you are taking the program after a recent Step 1 failure, use the feedback from your exam instead. What your days will look like: 1st: Go through the required lectures 2nd: Perform the quiz once each lecture is completed (will be indicated) 3rd: Perform a minimum of 30 minutes of fast-‐paced drills from quiz book (daily) 4th: Once all of the program lectures have been completed, we will focus on UW entirely for 14-‐21 days Daily Must: Minimum of 30 min of spoken Q&A (it has to be spoken aloud… this will improve your ability to remember). *If you cannot find someone to quiz you on any particular day, speak everything aloud to yourself (trust me this works). IMPORTANT: The Step 1 program is mainly delivered in ‘system’ format, which is how the USMLE questions are mainly asked. However, in the UW qbank there are topics broken down by individual discipline (ie. Physio, Pathophysio, Pathology, Pharm, etc). For this reason, we are going to take you intensely through all of the lecture material initially, then you are going to focus completely on the UW qbank for 14-‐21 solid days, integrating the information from each question into your coursebooks. This will allow you to flow through UW much faster, it will force you to go back over all of the course material, and it will help to reinforce the important
things as they will come up again and again. It will also train your brain and body to last through the vigorous hour-‐long blocks of questions, day after day. Below is your schedule based on the your desired timeframe (4, 8, or 12 weeks). Where is says ‘lecture, this means watch lecture and take notes’. Last piece of important info: Start and end each day with a 15-‐minute review of the previous day’s information. * Don’t forget to include 30 minutes of aloud Q&A everyday.
At the completion of your actual lecture sequence, you now want to dive into USMLE World questions full-‐time. You should do these questions in timed format, performing a full 46-‐48 question block at a time. Aim to perform 3-‐4 full blocks per day (this includes reviewing the answers and adding notes throughout your course lectures). You want to mix the questions for the simple reason that if you perform questions in a particular discipline and you know which discipline you are doing, often times it changes your thought process and you will focus more on the discipline you know you’re being tested on… If you mix the questions, you will force yourself to think more generally and this is how you will feel on the real USMLE exam, so it makes sense to use the QBanks this way as well. Go through the entire block of questions without stopping, then once it is completed, go over the questions very thoroughly and add notes (annotate) into your course book. The reason why we do it this way is because it forces you to review your course material as you are learning to think about the information in a different way, which will have a very profound effect on your learning process and upon your ability to answer questions. NOTE: Be sure you are using our test-‐taking strategy guide principles while doing UW questions… When you have completed the first run-‐through of UW questions, and done a more thorough review of the information from both your notes and your UW notes, it is time to perform a 2nd run-‐through of the UW questions. For this, use the ‘Success Strategy Guide’ which will walk you through the ideal way to ensure you know the information as well as possible. Upon completion of your 2nd run-‐through of the USMLE World questions using our strategy, it is time to take your 2nd NBME exam. The goal here is to determine whether you still have any weaknesses that need to be addressed. Based on the results, you want to dedicate 1-‐2 weeks to each weakness, then once you have done this, retake another NBME. The goal is to eliminate your weaknesses and achieve an NBME result that is equivalent to at least a 215-‐220 on your real USMLE exam (use our NBME conversion chart: http://www.usmlesuccess.net/nbme-‐to-‐usmle-‐
conversion-‐chart). At The Academy, our recommendation is to achieve at least 2-‐3 consecutive strong NMBE performances with scores of at least 500. If you have achieved this level of consistency with your NBME exams, you can rest assured that you will do well on your real USMLE exam.
