Tested 8th May. The exam is doable.
(Not sure if this is the correct flair)
Heres my breakdown of what the exam felt like hoping it’ll help someone because I certainly needed a lot of reassurance.
Question stems
Yes you’re gonna get a few questions that are 15-20 line essays but you will also get questions that are straightforward and 3-5 sentences long. I felt like the length was very similar to uworld stems with a ton of tiny, irrelevant details sprinkled here and there to confuse you. However I still think it was a lot easier than NBME 32 (that form wrecked my brain) and if I had to choose I’d say it was similar to free 120.
Content
I don’t think the content of what they asked was very obscure or unbelievably hard. There will be a few questions here there that’ll make you go like ‘wth are they even asking?’ but i think we all know to be mentally prepared for those. I will say though PLEASE DO NBMES PROPERLY!!!!
There weren’t a lot of calculation questions. Ethics was quite a bit, Biostats was mainly epidemiology and there were a lot of second order questions for pharma especially.
I also noticed there were multiple questions about the same concept asked in different ways.
NBME
I can not stress this enough. DO NBMEs properly and REVISE REVISE REVISE. Now im not saying go through the incorrects only or the education objective but I’m talking about the entirety of whatever disease/concept they’re testing. Ik that sounds like a lot but if there’s a particular question that’s frequently been asked across forms, it’s highly likely to show up (it did on mine) but in a different way. So for eg if they’re asking you about disease A and B and C are the mechanisms/facts but unrelated to each other, they’ll most likely to ask you about B and the answer choices will be related to C ( I’m sorry if this sounds confusing I really dk how explicitly I can say stuff without it being considered leaking the paper or wtv)
DO HIGH YIELD NBME IMAGES!!
Just guess the correct answer
I’ll be honest, at some points the exam just felt like a guessing game. They’ll ask you something obvious and the answer choices will be so obscure or vice versa (bec they don’t wanna use buzzy words) and you’ll just have to cancel out the least likely options to get to the right one and for a few questions the answer ends up making sense in the end. But you really need to have good basics so you can apply some kind of concept and get to an answer. I feel like they were trying to test whether you know the basics/concepts and are able to apply it without any of the buzzy, straightforward descriptions.
Guys please don’t panic. At the end of the day the exam tests your knowledge on medicine and basic science which we’ve consistently been studying. So no matter how they phrase a question if you know xyz is the main cause of abc you’ll be good to go. Do your best and go with a clear mind and DO NOT OVERTHINK. pls I can’t even tell you how many answers I changed bec I was unsure of myself and thought ‘well it can’t be that straightforward there must be more to it.’
GOOD LUCK!!