Prep Questions for Success!
Doing questions on a daily basis is extremely important to your board preparation. There will be a lot of them on your Step 1 boards. Doesn’t it make sense? The USMLE’s and COMLEX will test your medical knowledge with these questions. Your job is not to test your knowledge but to learn from them.
Wow, what an insightful comment- your job is to learn! You would think that we wouldn’t have to tell students this. Yet there are plenty of you out there that actually think their QBank score will be factored into their board scores. Guess what? It’s not! However, those questions, if done properly, are raising your scores!
Don’t do questions! Confused? Don’t do questions, do explanations! Think about the tests you have taken in medical school. Was it the easy questions or the hard ones that people talked about after the test? You learn from your mistakes. The majority of your learning experience will come from reading the explanations to the questions you do. Which means even if you get the question right always read the explanation. Here’s a good technique: For every question you get right, come up with a factually supported statement explaining why. If your “why statement” is wrong, you learn even more!
Be sure to read why all the answers are wrong. This will help you learn even more and not make a similar mistake come boards time.
Your board review books don’t cover every possible question on your boards! This might seem surprising but you will find some questions on your boards will be about some very obscure things. Not even important enough to cover in a review book. When you are doing practice questions you may run into some of these. Trust us, the more obscure the more likely you are to remember it come test time. This is another reason incorporating questions into your daily routine is important. They are a great way to fill in the “obscure topics” that review books don’t cover.
Break up the normal routine. Over and over again we preach to break up the routine. During you boards review period you will become incredibly bored of sitting in a chair and reading. Even though questions are actually the same thing, they are a great way to change up the way you get information into your head.
It really doesn’t matter if you use QBank, QBook, or any other question resources. What does matter is that you realize right or wrong is not important. The explanations are the key to your success. Remember questions are not a test during your preparation. They are a learning technique.
QUESTION TIP: A lot of people ask about making a schedule. For questions here is what we recommend. Do 20 questions in 20 minutes everyday. Then review the question explanations for 40 minutes(for a total of 1 hour/day) A lot of programs recommend 50 questions a night and two hours of review. We feel this is way too much. By doing only 20 a day, you are more likely to thoroughly read the explanations and stay on your schedule.
(And of course, when you take a study break to check your email, check out Board Aid’s Question, D.O.C., and Fact of the DAY!)
