Top 3 Tips to Do Well on the USMLE STEP Exams

Once you have gotten into a Medical School, you realize that the concept of "being busy" you may have had in Undergrad was laughable compared to what you are experiencing now.  Regardless of how many courses in University that you took to prepare for your career in Medicine, after the first 2 weeks, everyone will all be in the same position and feel overwhelmed at the amount of new material you are expected to learn quickly and precisely.  

This test is a comprehension assessment of all the general sciences that you covered in your first two years of Medical School and tests precise mechanisms and how they apply to Medicine.  After passing this test, the path becomes no less clear and within a year, you will also face STEP 2 Clinical Knowledge and Clinical Skills.  

The former is a test designed to identify if you are able to effectively treat patients and understand the order that life-saving interventions need to be carried out and the latter is to assess how well you interact with patients and formulate a logical differential diagnosis based on ambiguous presentations.  

These exams are all significant in your ability to find a Residency position and no amount of cramming can even come close to adequately preparing you for this battle.  I will present some of the most commonly used study techniques and approaches that my peers and I used for the exams and what resources you should consider when you are studying for STEP exams yourself.  

Number 1:  Buy UWorld QBank 

This is the single-most important thing you can do for your preparation.  UWorld is a resource that you will use on the bus to school, while you're waiting for class to start, and something that you can do before you go to bed every night.  This is a Question Bank specific for STEP 1 and STEP 2 exams and you will work through over 1,000 questions in subjects that are covered on the USMLE.

These are close replicates to what you should expect to see on the actual examination and you can use this resource in two useful ways.  When you are covering material in class for the first time, you are able to generate quizzes based on a specific category and can learn some of the most  high-yield material that you must know for STEP.  

After you have worked through the questions, you can take a more useful approach by having a generalized test covering material for all subcategories for the exam.  This is very valuable because it helps you retain material from subjects you covered earlier in the year. Even if you have an IQ that rivals Einstein, the one fact that you will learn in Med School is that as so as you start learning new material, you easily forget all the material from past subjects. The human brain has not evolved enough to be able to retain such a vast amount of knowledge.  

You can also use "Education Mode" and have a comprehensive break down of the reasoning why certain answers are correct as well as why other responses are incorrect.  What I also liked was that you get a percentage breakdown of the number of people that selected each answer so you can see if you are stronger or weaker than your colleagues in a certain field.  

First Aid for the USLME And Study Groups 

Number 2:  First Aid for the USLME 

This is another resource that you should use in tandem with UWorld as you prepare for each STEP exam.  First Aid is a great resource because it covers all the high-yield information that you must know for the Test.  

One thing that you will soon realize, if you haven't already, is that there are way too many textbooks and resources on the market that can make it very hard to develop a concrete study strategy for the Test. Textbooks do not discriminate between common and rare diseases so it can be difficult to decide if the material you are even learning is something you are ever going to see in a Clinical Setting.  An attending will often use the term "Textbook Disease" when discussing a pathology that sounds interesting and gives amazing photos for a textbook company but something you will never see in real life.  One that I can think of off the top of my head would be Tropical Sprue.  

Any time I got a question wrong on UWorld, I would always find the tidbit of information in First Aid and may a highlight or marking to make sure I wouldn't make the same mistake again.  There is a new edition printed every year to correspond to new updates in the medical sector so I encourage you to buy the most current for the year you are doing your examination. 

READ 8 Things They Won’t Tell You about Medical School

Number 3:  Make a Study-Group 

Even if you did not have success with study groups at your University, I guarantee you that this time around, the outcome will be more favorable.  You are in Medical School now and no one is taking STEP exams lightly.  

Having someone else to help you go through material is an invaluable tool to make sure that you stay on track and cover everything that you need to.  It can also be a way to increase your efficiency because colleagues often have useful acronyms or ways of remembering certain diseases that would be something you had never even thought of.

 You may have heard continuously that doctors are part of a medical team and need to work with nurses and other hospital staff in order to treat their patients but you can also be a team with your peers and help each other get through this material.  The most detrimental factor that can hinder your studying is "burning-out."  This is the point where you are not motivated to study due to being overly stressed and overwhelmed by the material.  This will happen to everyone studying for these Exams just because of the sheer magnitude and length of time that you must study in order to do well.

The MCAT is a small quiz compared to the effort and time that you have to dedicate to this test and it is ludicrous that you are expected to be able to have the mental strength to sit behind a computer screen and complete a high-stress exam over an 8-hour period.  It is in your best interest to have someone on your side with you to help you get through these frustrations, the UWorld tests where you score 40%s, and the material you spend 2 hours studying and simply cannot remember one simple fact from the cue card.  Having a group around you will help relieve some of the stress by simply seeing you are not the only one struggling with the material.