The number of resources out there for Step 1 is ridiculous. I had no idea this test got people so riled up. I did a quick Google search and was floored by the amount of time and money people put into this thing. From hundreds of posts about which question bank to use to underground copies of lectures to formulations of the perfect study schedule, you can spend ages on the internet without actually getting any studying done. It's crazy.
But the utility of these things is iffy. What people post on forums is opinion, hearsay. Their data has an n of 1. When people suggest "don't study embryo, I only got 1 question" or "make sure you know your neuroleptic agents, all my pharm was antipsychotics", listening to that is simply bad science (or emotions running amok). People post their super high yield study schedules. What? Why would you want to study based on someone else's schedule? It just seems so bizarre to me.
That's the other crazy scary thing. All these schedules start two, three, four months before the test date. I'm less than two weeks away and have yet to read First Aid or BRS Path (books people "swear by"). I went through BRS Physiology yesterday and discovered something amusing. They include figures in there from another review book. What's even crazier - that review book (which I looked over earlier) includes figures from BRS Physiology. What? There's also this weird phenomenon where the same author will write two review books on the same subject and the text will be pretty much identical (it's remarkably apparent with Fadem's Behavioral Science books). What's up with that? (It's cause each publisher wants to have a complete set). There are a lot of mediocre review books out there. Most of them also have mistakes. But they sell well cause the target audience is medical students studying for an exam.
And then there's the heavy hitters. Kaplan offers thousand-dollar review courses. There's a whole audio pathology Goljan lecture series, but I gave up on that when I found him more offensive than memorable (some people really like his obnoxious sarcasm though). There's also an interesting dynamic with the question banks that everyone subscribes to. It benefits the company to write questions that are harder than actual questions because then when you do better on the real test than you did on practice tests, the company looks good.
This test would be much better pass/fail.
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In ancient Greece, the asclepion was a healing temple dedicated to Asclepius, the God of Medicine. Asclepius learned the art of surgery from the centaur Chiron and had the ability to raise the dead. The Rod of Asclepius is a roughhewn branch entwined with a single serpent.
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Hi! I am Craig Chen, a third year resident physician in anesthesiology at Stanford Hospitals and Clinics. I went to medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. Prior to medical school, I studied philosophy and biology at Stanford University, along with a minor in creative writing.
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