This is a great experience written by a very high scorer. I recommend that you have a
look at the number of times the student prepared the same course again and again.
Also check out all the materials used. I have linked out to the textbooks listed in the
experience Hi everyone this is my experience from an average student to above average USMLE score
I was a weak student in my medical school and used to always concentrate on playing the video
games rather than studies and i would barely pass.
After i finished medical college i started preparing for USMLE exam… till then i didn’t even know
the mechanism of action of Paracetamol. So my baseline was below average.
I start by collecting all the materials required for USMLE preparation like books, videos, pdfs and
other USMLE infos. I got my Kaplan Lecture Notes for USMLE Step 1, First Aid for USMLE Step 1,Then after that i started my preparation. I studied for a total of 14 months and i divided my
preparation time into 6 parts of varied duration. In the first pass of all the materials i did the
Kaplan videos with Kaplan lecture notes for USMLE Step 1. The lecture notes were not really
helpful in my test and i will tell you why below. At this time i found that i was forgetting faster than
i could remember meaning that i would read for 1 month and then at end of month i would try to
recollect what i study first day and i couldnt’ remember. This made me frustrated and i felt bad. So
i started doing First Aid for USMLE Step 1 along with Kaplan and my offline UW books. This
boosted my confidence as i could see i was improving. I would recommend everyone to start
doing UW from the day – 1 and along with FA. The reason is that if you are not doing questions
then you will not know how to actually memorize and understand. I say this because initially i
think i wasted the first 3 months because i was preparing for the USMLE like my university exams.
However USMLE is different pattern. Don’t rely on the rote memorization that you did in MBBS as
that is worthless method. I found out hard way, you dont do like me. Along the way i was also
preparing my FA by adding UW and important Kaplan lecture notes for USMLE Step 1 material
into it. I say important kaplan material as i recommend that you dont put all Kaplan materials
inside as you wont be able to see the text of FA if you have a lot of Kaplan materials. TIP: dont do
Kaplan indepth except the Biochem part as that is only useful part, rest is not that important.
The first round lasted 5.5 months. Then i started the second round and it lasted 2.5 months.
During this time i started doing Fundamentals of Pathology – Hussein Sattar (Pathoma) and
Goljan. Rapid Review Pathology by Edward Goljan is very very high yield and i loved hearing the
Goljan Audio, but i soon found out that doing Rapid Review Pathology by Edward Goljan for such a
long time stil i couldnt remember much. So i left it and i did only Fundamentals of Pathology –
Hussein Sattar (Pathoma). Before pathoma all the histo slides were only random pink material
which i skipped. lolz. After Pathoma i actually understand the meaning of things and i understand
that Histo is actually not so tough. So i blame my professor poor teaching for this. They taught
nothing and hence i failed in histo before Pathoma. For me Fundamentals of Pathology – Hussein
Sattar (Pathoma) is A+ resource and I recommend you all to do it thoroughly.
After the 2nd round i did the 3rd round and this time again it was hard and i even had a break of
few days in between and i was very depressed because of it so i decided not to take a break again.
I did continuous prep after this as my momentum was lost because of the break. Now in this part i
started with NBME. NBME was good… it wasnt tough questions but it is scaled very hard so even if you get 90% correct its not like 270 or anything. My scores of NBMEs which i gave in round 3 were
240s.
Then in round 4 i started Conrad Fischer’s book Kaplan USMLE Medical Ethics and also High Yield
Behavioural Science and High Yield Gross Anatomy. I recommend to do HY anatomy as these days
there are a lot of anatomy questions being asked and after doing this book it helped me a lot as i
didnt know a lot of stuff. Also i did Anatomy Shelf notes as it has a lot of important anatomy
concepts. Now finally in this round i was getting mid 250s. I was astonished i could get so high a
score as i thought i was a mediocre student.
In round 5 & round 6 i re-did everything again but i kept a special focus on the topics i didnt know
in NBME well like Behavioural milestones and Lysosomal storage disease. Before the exam i re-did
all the tough topics i didnt know before and it helped a lot. Also i did the heart sounds each day till
my exam and believe me before this it felt like random noise in my ears but i got both the heart
sound questions in my exam correct.
Overall: I will say that the exam is tough and by no means straight forward but if you work hard
you can definitely crack it. If i could then you will be able to too…
If you liked this experience and it inspired you to work harder I recommend you have
a look at the Resources to use to score high on your exam. I have created lists of
important books which may aid you in your decision making process as to what
resources to study while trying to ace a particular subject for your USMLE prep. List of Books used:
- Kaplan Lecture Notes for USMLE Step 1
- First Aid for USMLE Step 1
- Fundamentals of Pathology – Hussein Sattar (Pathoma)
- Rapid Review Pathology by Edward Goljan
- Conrad Fischer’s book Kaplan USMLE Medical Ethics
- High Yield Behavioural Science
- High Yield Gross Anatomy