My experience!
For sure this was the hardest exam out of all the USMLE exams. I took CK in Oct 2018.
Prep time: 5 months
Did UW complete once and then did the marked and wrong ques
For Biostats solved UW step 3 Biostats thrice, uw Biostats review, Biostats for CK and Biostats portion from FA.
For micro and pharm read FA for an hour everyday for 3 months
Read general path from FA quickly
For CCS: I did atleast 2 cases every day for five months. I used crush CCS and UW cases.
UWSA1: 192 (14 days before exam)
UWSA2: 217 (6 days before exam)
Real deal: 231 Alhumdulilah
Exam day1 (Sept 19): It was alright, although I did not get many pharma or micro ques, and the ones I got were really simple. I got a few immunology ques but they were so vague that I couldn’t even guess what it was. Overall the question length was short. Biostats mostly was straightforward. I got roughly 6-7 Biostats ques in each block.
Exam day 2 (Sept 26): I found ques on day 2 a little weird with tons of risk factors and prognosis ques and I think only thing that can help is presence of mind and basic knowledge. I didn’t do the prognosis file so I have no idea. Otherwise the ques were simple recalls from uw step 3 ( although I could t recall much because of the gap between my 2 days lol).
I got 7 20 min cases, all of them ended in 13-14 minutes. 6 10 min. All of my patients got better although in 2 cases I didn’t even know what the diagnosis was.
Overall the thing which helped me most was being relaxed and confident on the exam day. I just kept going.
I am really thankful to my amazing study buddies
Sa’dya Waqas Amir
and Maneet Maneet and all the other people in this group and otherwise for helping me go through this tough exam
I will try to answer as much ques in the comment as possible.
Please don’t inbox me, ask the ques in comments, also pardon me if I am slow in replies until Oct 21st. After that, I will be able to help in a better way.