DIP Episode 9 - Studying For The USMLE Step 2CK

Welcome. My name is Devine. I am a fourth-year medical student. Today's podcast is a departure from our usual theme of going over educational material. I feel the need to also talk about the exams people take. And in this case I'm going to be talking about the USMEL Step 2 CK. I just want to give you my thoughts on the exam, how I think you should prep for the exam, and just certain things to keep in mind. And I'll just prefer this by saying that these are my thoughts. Okay, so you should take them with a healthy dose of skepticism. I may be selling you snake oil right now. Okay, so don't believe every word I say. Just try to verify for yourself. Okay, so these are my thoughts. These are the things I would say just based on my own experiences and the experiences of many other learners that I know. So the first thing I will say is that the best prep for the USMEL Step 2 CK exam is actually studying really hard for and crushing your shelf exams. If you're doing really well on your shelf exams and you're crushing them, it is almost the given that you also do well on your Step 2 CK exam. Okay, so that's the very first important thing. Like don't blow off your shelf exams. Even if the makeup a lower percentage of your total grades in 30 years, I would encourage you to study hard for them. If you're doing well on those things, chances are you do well on your Step 2 CK. Now, how is the USMEL Step 2 CK organized? It's organized in eight blocks.

So it's an extra block more than Step 1 and it's eight blocks of 40 questions. So there's a total of 320 questions. And if you don't go through the tutorial in the beginning, whatever, you should get one hour total of break time. The exam has a lot of medicine on it. I'll see probably like half the exam is like all medicine, internal medicine. And then I'll see a roughly equal breakdown of OB-GYN, of PEEDS, of surgery, of CYC. There's some neuro, but the neuro did at least on my experience. We're taking all the practice tests and whatnot. The neuro doesn't seem to be super, super highly represented, like the other disciplines I mentioned. And just like Step 1, there are heart sound questions, so you sort of know how those work already. But an introduction to Step 2 CK, the drug at questions. The drug at questions, you'll probably see about four or five number of areas by exam. And I would encourage you, it's one of those questions where a good approach sort of helps. If you see, you world will sort of help you prepare for those, but I would highly, highly encourage you to at least that's one thing I feel that worked for me really well. I always marked the drug at questions and came back to them at the end of the block, because they take a lot of time to sort of sort of through. Okay? You want to make sure you score the easy points first before rumbling through these drug ats. Now, there are three practice exams that are currently being sold by the MBME.

There's an MBME 6, 7, and 8. And there's also the free one 20, like there existed for Step 1. In terms of feel for the exam, I will say that MBME 7 and 8 very closely replicates the difficulty of the real test. But in my experience and the experience of many other people I know, those exams tend to underpredict people's scores. MBME 6 is an easier exam. It tends to overpredict people's scores somewhat. So I will say in general, your exam grade will probably, I mean, obviously I can't offer any guarantees. But your exam grade will probably lie somewhere between your MBME 6 score and a little above your MBME 7 and 8 scores. Okay? So for me, I chose to take MBME 6 closest to my exam, because I didn't want to lose score to sort of psych me out before I take my real test. Now, in terms of absolutes, right? So these are things I just found to be really helpful. And I will say I have a there, I will give a stronger commendation as to an individual using these resources. So these are, if you're going with a USPSTF guidelines, I'll see these deserve like an air recommendation. Okay? First thing is your world, right? You should obviously reset your world and redo all the questions. Your world is a great learning tool. You may not be the best testing tool, but it's a great learning tool. I would encourage you to use your just reset it and do all the questions. Another thing I did was I redid all the MBME's for the different shelf exams, right?

So each MBME shelf exam has for practice tests. I basically thought of this as a second cue bank and I found it to be extremely helpful, extremely helpful, probably even more helpful than your world to me actually. So it's just one of those things I will highly highly recommend if you can do all the MBME exams for the different blocks, probably with the exception of Neuro, but I'll say all the MBME exams are fair game. I will say I found those to be really helpful. And then I did the first and second you world self assessments. If you think you want to double dip, like do like replicate a full length exam, you can do both in one day. On like step one where I did like a full length practice exam, actually did not do that for step two and I did not find that to have hampered me in any way. I feel like after taking all the practice exams, all the shelf exams and burning through your world in the third year, I just felt I was prepared for like longer testing periods, but if you're like, I want to replicate the full length, probably doing the two year work self assessments back to back may not be such a bad idea. Now the free one 20, you should certainly do that. It's something I did like three days before my exam. The questions are relatively easy, but they have like a decent ish predictive value for how well you don't the test, right?

So if you're scoring like in the high 80%, so in the 90% on the you on the free one 20, you'll probably get above average on the exam, you'll probably get like in the 240s or 250s or 260s. Okay? And then you should obviously do the NV Me practice test, right? Like the 678 as I described earlier. The other absolutes I also recommend the step one, the first date for the USMELY step one, the bio stats chapters and the public health chapters. I will certainly, certainly, certainly recommend knowing those. And I know that risk factors are very commonly tested. So I would make sure you know risk factors for different diseases like the OB-GYN diseases, or the cardiovascular diseases, or like these high yield USPSTF recommendations. I would definitely make sure you know those. Okay? So make sure you go through the first date step one, bio stats and public health chapters. Very helpful. Now, so just a dedicated period length. I will say probably four weeks, four weeks is probably about enough. I wouldn't go with no dedicated period. I know you have heard some advice about that. Like, oh, you just finished third year, you know your stuff really well, you crushed all your shells and got in the high 90s for all of them. Let me go ahead and just study for like two, three days and take the exam. I just will not recommend that. I will highly recommend taking about at least four weeks for a dedicated period. I think that's about enough time to help you prep for the test.

Now, in terms of book resources, right? So the truth is, if you've been crushing your shell, right? So again, if you've been getting like in the 90s or high 80s, like raw scores on your shelf exams, you will probably be just fine for the exam by taking, by just resetting your doing it again, doing your MBA me's and maybe using some kind of review book. And I'll talk about review books in a bit. If you've been crushing your shelves, I think that's probably enough. You'll probably be just fine with just those resources. So in terms of resources, but if again, if you've not been crushing your shelves, you should probably do a little more than what I just mentioned. Okay. So in terms of suggested things to do, one combo that may work pretty well and actually seen a lot of people this worked really well for is using step up to medicine in combination with a review book. The reason I say step up to medicine is that it's the bulk of the exam. Medicine is a huge chunk, at least probably like 50% of the test. Okay. Step up to medicine is a great resource. An alternative to that is the NMS medicine case book. You can use any of those and that will give you a very good overview of medicine. Okay. Although the NMS medicine casebook is a more detailed book, step up to medicine is a more recent book. So just something to keep in mind. So you can use step up to medicine and then add a review book. Okay.

The thing is the review books for step two CK are nowhere near as good as the review books for step one. There's nothing that's as good as first aid for the US Emily step one, but I will say some books that I found to be adequate again. I think they're like decent books. They're not great, but they're decent. I would say first aid for the US Emily step two CK is a decent book and the US Emily step two secrets is also a decent book as well. So saying all those books will probably work well if you just infuse those with step up to medicine. Now another thing you could try is to use online method. Online method is good for many things. It will teach you management. It will prepare you really well for intern year. It will help you answer many questions correctly on the exam. The only thing is online method I feel like it's good for many things, but it's not a very detailed resource and believe it or not, the step two CK exam, yes, it has a lot of general things, but it also has like certain details you need to know that will not necessarily be covered in online method. So for those details, I would highly recommend getting some kind of review book to make that happen. And again, in terms of review books, you can use first aid for step two CK. You can use US Emily step two secrets. I know some people also recommend master the boards for step two. I did not use that and I've never evaluated that, so I can't really see much about that.

But I know that for many years, many people have used that resource and also found it to be to be pretty helpful. Now, so if you're using online method, again, I would highly highly recommend throwing in a review book alongside it. Now, the next resource is DIT. That's Doctors in training. Whatever these are is in, I don't know why this is not recommended by many people, but actually find this to be a pretty good resource. It's pretty detailed, gives you a lot of those details that you want to know. And it actually goes a fair amount into management. So I would say if you're like, I want to pick like one standalone resource that I'm using in addition to like your world and the other absolutes that I mentioned, I would give DIT a fair shake. I think it's a pretty good resource. It's pretty detailed and it's relatively comprehensive. I mean, obviously you'll see exam questions on your real test that you're like, not seen this anywhere. But I think DIT is actually a pretty good resource that is not recommended enough. Now, other resources, right? So obviously you've heard of Emma Holiday. She's a wonderful lady, has awesome videos. They're just very good ways to go through a lot of material very quickly. So that's something else you could try. Another thing you could also consider are the Kaplan Lecture Notes. So Kaplan, they have a series of lecture notes. Probably comes out to about 1500 pages total of information.

They're a huge bear to get through excellent resource, but it's probably impossible to get through all of that in a four week dedicated period. So if you look at a kind of present that has like flurryed amounts of time, you may consider that. Another resource you could consider as well. If you have flurryed amounts of time is like the Toronto notes. They are written by some people from Canada. They are like super thorough, super good, but again, they're bear to get through. I will say for most people it's probably impossible to get through the Toronto notes. Now, let's see, is any other thing I'm forgetting? I think I will say those are the big things to get through with regards to questions. I will say so many people don't take question analysis as seriously as these should. This was something I feel like I took very seriously, and I think it probably helped me a lot more than I imagined on the real exam. But seriously, I would say that when you're reviewing questions, try to ask yourself, why did I get this answer wrong? Did I get it wrong because it was a knowledge deficit? It was a knowledge deficit. Obviously, you should go back and fix that knowledge deficit. But many people don't get answers wrong solely for knowledge deficits. They get answers wrong for many other reasons. One reason could be that you have the wrong approach. How could you have the wrong approach? One could mean you could be making assumptions.

So things that are not in the queue stem, you assume them to be there to make an answer sound right. Don't do those things. Another common mistake is for people to pick the wrong side of too closely related but different diagnoses. It's like a person confusing supervene a kevess syndrome with the presentation of a pan-coast tumor. Those are two things that are relatively similar, but there are few key things that point in one direction versus the other. So I would also be a question where a person has both problems. But the thing is if you're learning too closely related diagnoses, I will highly encourage you to try to ask yourself what I like the one or two hooks that lead you in one direction versus the other as you're going through the test. Another thing is overthinking questions. You see many people they overthink questions and that basically prevents them from picking the simple answer that is like staring right in front of them. I will encourage you to not overthink as you're going through your real exam. Most of the exam questions are relatively straightforward if you've done your due diligence and your studying. I know that you were out like your word is a great learning resource but it's also quite good at getting you to overthink things. I will just encourage you to take a most straightforward approach. A most straightforward mindset as you're going through your exam.

And then another thing that could happen is you could be completely lost or you could be like I have no clue what's going on here. One thing I think I found to be helpful on those circumstances is just to make a problem list. Just like you don't medicine. Just write down all the things that are like off in the queue stem and then just try to put everything to get asked yourself. With all these things, all these problems, what is the one diagnosis that seems to unify all these things? That in some instances can point you towards the right answer. And another thing you could also potentially try to ask yourself, okay, I have no clue what's going on. Here are all the answer choices. If this answer was right, what's the classic MBM or USMLE queue stem? They would write to support this answer. If the queue stem does not meet those parameters that you come up with in your mind, you probably should not pick that answer choice. Other strategies I would say as you're going through the exam, I will spend no more than a minute on the initial pass through block. That will give you about 20 minutes to go back and go through your marked questions. You don't necessarily have to go through the whole block all over again. Just questions that you're like, I want to see this again or I want to think some more about this. Those are good questions to go through on your second pass. And again, try not to overthink questions. Just go with a simple answer that requires no assumptions.

It is almost always the right one. So don't make assumptions. So stay within the boundaries. Stay within the confines of the question. Don't overstep your boundaries. I've just always found as a general principle that all you need to answer a question is sitting right in front of you in the queue stem. So don't make assumptions to make an answer that you're mulling over. Sound really good to you and then you go ahead and pick it. Okay. And so I mean, I mean, obviously this is not a comprehensive thing. But I think with these strategies, you should and these recommendations have given, you should sort of have a good idea as to how you're going to go ahead and approach the exam. If you have any questions, don't be afraid to contact me. There's a contact button and I wish all the best as you study for step two CK for those of you that plan to take step two CES later in the year. Go ahead and register sooner rather than later so that you can get a good exam date, good exam spot as well because test dates go very quick. You may be surprised that you're trying to register in April and you only see dates in November. And if you can try to schedule the exam after whatever practice step two CES, your Met School administers because if you go through those motions, you'll just sort of help you prep for the real deal. So I wish all the best on whatever exams you're taking.

Congratulations to the four tiers that just matched and we'll see you in the next episode of the Divine Intervention Podcast. Have a blessed day. Bye.

Studying hard for and crushing your shelf exams, as performance there correlates highly with Step 2 CK success.

Eight blocks, totaling 320 questions.

Mark them and save them for a second pass after completing the easier questions to ensure easy points are scored first.

At least four weeks; insufficient time is not recommended, even if previous performance was excellent.

Assuming information or making assumptions that are not explicitly stated in the question stem (vignette).

DIT (Doctors in Training), noting it is often under-recommended but highly detailed.

Drug At Questions (DA Qs).

Doing both the first and second U World self-assessments back-to-back.

Bio-stats chapters and Public Health chapters.

A knowledge deficit means you genuinely don't know the fact; an approach error means you made an assumption or used the wrong clinical framework.

Redoing all the MBME shelf exams (treating them like a second question bank).

Only use information that is sitting right in front of you in the question stem; do not make assumptions.

Drug At Questions (DA Qs).

Doing both the first and second U World self-assessments back-to-back.

Bio-stats chapters and Public Health chapters.

A knowledge deficit means you genuinely don't know the fact; an approach error means you made an assumption or used the wrong clinical framework.

Redoing all the MBME shelf exams (treating them like a second question bank).

Only use information that is sitting right in front of you in the question stem; do not make assumptions.