Hey everyone ! I wanted to share my CK experience with you. This group was a great support and reading other’s experiences helped me refine my preparation strategies.
Prep time : 4 months with a gap of around 2 weeks
Prep materials :
-Step up to medicine once : covers IM only and sometimes a lot of low yield materials but still great if you need to refresh your memory about key IM concepts.
-UW2 1st pass low 60% Carefully read every word of it . This should be the backbone of your prep. 2nd pass 90% only went over incorrects.
-CMS forms (Mostly newer forms 3 and 4): Try to find a SP and correct these together. This helped me a looot !
-Otherwise no MTB no OME or other sources. (Probably First aid step 1 was the most helpful book)
My self assessment scores were:
Nbme 7 – 220 (45 days before exam date)
UWSA 2 – 222 (1 month)
NBME 6 - 245 (20 days)
UWSA 1- 258 (15 days)
NBME 8- 228 (35 mistakes) (10 days) Freaked me out but I knew that curve was weird (people got 240’s with 30 mistakes)
NBME 120: 84%
Real score: 253
My score was an average of UWSA 1 and NBME 6, though UWSA 2 was very helpful for prep.
Exam Day:
Got around 6 hours of sleep which is excellent compared to my sleepless step 1 exam night.The exam was really tough. Didn’t find difficulties with time mgmnt but marked 50% or more Qs in every single block which can seem very scary. Qs weren’t long but quite vague. You basically feel that you don’t grasp what they’re looking for. The thing is that you must trust your prep and feeling and keep going till the last Qs of the exam. I also had a fair number of step 1 related Qs but most of these won’t be an issue if you already took step 1.
Hope this will help others who like me have a relatively short period time for prep and good luck for you all.