I have passed step 3 by God’s mercy, my parents prayers, and my silly fiance’s constant motivation about telling me that I had nothing to lose, that the score won’t matter, all I need is to pass. This is a small push for anyone who is on the fence about taking the exam.
I gave my step 1 exam a year and a half ago and CK about 8 months ago. My scores on those exams were 250+ and 260.
I went to the exam with only having done about 20% of uworld, only did biostats and some random infectious disease questions because this stuff is quite volatile for me. This by far has been the scariest exam of my life.
I had applied for this match (I matched, thank god) and the only goal for me to take this exam was hoping to get H1B visa or if the result came out after the match result to just get it out of the way before residency.
I told myself I had nothing to lose, and if worse came to worst, I wouldn’t lose my residency spot. I decided to take UWSA1 and thought if I passed I would book my exam in a week and take it, and thats what happened.
I got 210 on uwsa1 and I decided to concentrate on biostats and ccs.
The takeaway from this is, that trust your UWSA, if you passed that, you would most likely pass the exam. If you have a solid base from step 1 and CK, don’t hesitate to take the exam, just go for it.
Brush up on biostats, before every step exam, I go through Dr Randy Neil’s biostats videos on youtube, they have been a life saver for me, do CK tables and do CCS. I did uworld CCS cases, and couldn’t complete all of them too. Just try to get a hang of how to manage emergency vs routine cases.
I felt in the dumps after the exam because I didn’t receive any positive input or feedback from my patients in CCS, guess like how all the exam experience posts mention, this feeling is normal, and I’m only going to reinforce it.
I’m so delighted, this news was more exciting to me than finding out I have matched, so you can imagine I absolutely thought I had totalled the exam.
What would I have done differently:
Obviously, at least for the sake of my sanity gone through Uworld completely at least once.
Tonnes and tonnes of step 1 questions on day 1, so I would say its worthwhile to go through FA, but if you dont have time at least the Monoclonal antibodies and their MOA, Immunology section of diseases, classification of Gram negative and Gram Positive, Gene Translocations in Cancers, MOA of Hormones like cAMP or Gene, mechanism of Alpha Beta receptors and MOA of antifungals. EVERYTHING ABOUT HIV is HIGH YIELD.
CCS cases because it gives u feedback.
CK tables for things like pulmonary embolism, DVT, and mostly for all things that have scores and that we are likely to forget.
My final score is 230+.
Hope this helps at least one person in doubt.