This is due primarily to the quality of its questions and rigor of its explanations. UWorld content is updated throughout the year, which keeps the Qbank incredibly current in the changing world of medicine and medical testing.

Students who use UWorld achieve consistently topflight results, but where do they go wrong? What are potential pitfalls that second year med students should make sure to avoid in their own prep?

We've identified the five biggest mistakes that med students make with UWorld for Step 1 prep and also posted five more big UWorld mistakes here.

Many students come to us concerned about starting UWorld questions too early in their Step 1 study period. They say they're not ready to tackle a Qbank as difficult as UWorld. They would prefer to start with an easier Qbank or focus more on reading. This is a mistake! Step 1 is a question-based exam. Therefore, the best approach to studying for Step 1 is to incorporate UWorld questions early and often.

Even if you have not finished all of the material five months before your exam, there will certainly be some content you've covered. For example, if you've already had your immunology course, do some immunology UWorld questions! If you've learned biochemistry, create a few short biochemistry question bank sets from UWorld. During your heme block in second year, do some heme questions. Attempting difficult questions is a great way to focus your studying and highlight areas of deficiency.

Additionally, you might want to do UWorld questions on the topics you're learning in coursework. Remember that you can customize your question sets based on discipline. You can focus on heme pathology or heme pharmacology, if that is what your course is covering. No need to deal with biostats or biochem during a heme pathophys block. The earlier you expose yourself to difficult case vignettes, the more efficient your question-based studying will be later on.

If you are in your second year of med school, buy UWorld now and start building your basic sciences foundation by working through questions.

UWorld questions are prompts. They are vehicles for practicing the pattern recognition, clinical reasoning, and test-taking skills that we need to score high on the USMLE. However, doing UWorld question banks alone and skimming the explanations is not enough to achieve mastery of the material.

Top scorers understand that UWorld is best used as a learning tool, and most of the learning happens when reviewing explanations—especially on questions you got wrong. This is significantly less than a Kaplan course usually costs students.

Is UWorld harder than Nclex? Can you repeat UWorld questions? UWorld does not repeat or rephrase their questions. Can you share UWorld? How long does it take to finish UWorld? UWorld is not the place to be learning information. On average a single question takes about 1 minute to answer and 2 minutes to review. The average college student can read words per minute.

At that speed many of you would be able to read this article twice in the time it takes for a single question. What is the best way to use UWorld? How to Best Use UWorld Qbank to Study Take seven 60 minute blocks of about 46 questions with one hour of total break time to use over the seven blocks.

Start at the same time of day your exam is scheduled. After you have done 8 hours of testing relax the rest of the day, you will need it! Should I do UWorld twice?

Thank you so much for your kind words, and question. I hope that my advice is not reaching you too late. I best advice is to do more questions, and to learn the topics that you are weakest at, but focusing on a manageable amount of information every day. The best thing to do is to take an NBME now, to see where you are, to get an idea of whether you are improving your scores are not, which would let you know how effective your studying is.

I wanted to know how many questions should I be doing per day or week or month? I was wondering if you could tell me, how exactly do you reason through the question? I must be lacking the integration and application skills or I may just not have understood the connections well … Would you have any tips? Thank you so much for your question. Certainly, a lack of integration and application can certainly trip you up, and to prevent you from improving your scores.

My best advice is to both slow down when you are learning topics, so you give yourself enough time to learn them appropriately, as well as to make it your mission to understand what each sentence means in every NBME or question that you do. Would you recommended doing random sets of 44 or Taylor them by subject?? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Any suggestions on how to tackle Step2 CK as far as if I should do uworld questions as random sets of 44 or by subjects?

Any advice is greatly appreciated! I will be finishing DIT with 9 days to go. I still have questions left to go through on UWorld. So any extra time each day would maybe be spent on a topic I feel the weakest on. I hope your exam went well. I hope this can help you for your preparations for self exams and for Step 2! My Step 1 exam is 13 days away and unable to push it back any further. In light of this, I had two questions:.

Certainly, my big weakness I feel is applying basic pathophysiological principles to new questions. Sorry for the delayed response — hope your test went well! Studying pathogenesis to presentation at any stage should help, as should spaced repetition, although in general the longer the timeframe, these will be even more useful.

I was wondering do you have answer keys and explanations for NBME 15, 16, 17? Or any reliable sources you would recommend? Typically I go over this with students that I tutor, to help them to understand any issues they are having with interpretation of the questions themselves. The most important thing that you can do is to understand the material, not necessarily memorize facts, like so many other services out there.

Alec, Hope all is well. My first quesiton is how many anki questions do you do a day? How many new ones do you do a day? And, how do you interpret U-world scores?

I basically was doing it by systems, and now I am slowly reverting to mixed blocks. I basically outlined all of pathoma into an excel file and iam going to import it into anki. Any thoughts? At the peak, I did about to cards in a day of old reviews, and roughly 40 new cards in a day. If you are scoring below passing, I would still study by system. Honestly, it sounds like you are trying to do too much, and should probably pare down some of your resources.

I would not do both Firecracker and Anki, and would choose one or the other, otherwise you risk overwhelming yourself by trying to chase way too many rabbits. That puts me at the 5th percentile.

Do you know how that compares to an actual Step 3 score? Thank you so much for your message. Unfortunately, there is no perfect way to predict what your score will be particularly when using question banks.

Alec, thank you for all your insights. Would you recommend using another review book for your method? Thank you so much! Thanks so much for your message! I personally used UWorld for Step 2CK, doing questions and studying from them, and have known many people who have successfully done that strategy. Great question. It really depends on whether you are scoring well already, whether you are close your exam, and what your overall goals are.

If not, particularly if you have more than a month until your exam, it might be better to do subject specific so you can hit your weak areas in a more concentrated fashion. Hi Alec, thanks for putting together the website.

What do you recommend for first year students? Should we do UWorld questions as we cover different subjects in class? Make anki cards for each class so when it comes around for our dedicated study time, we have more time to do qbank questions?

Thank you so much for your message, and for your kind words. In general, I do not recommend doing question banks during your first year. I know that a lot of people will tell you that doing Q banks early is critical etc. If you use spaced repetition well, you should only have to go through a question bank one time. Some of your approach will depend on how important your class ranking is, since the more important it is the more I would focus on your class work.

That said, I still focused a lot on my coursework, even though Stanford is pass fail throughout the preclinical years. My best advice to you is to use your coursework as a supplement to your studying for Step 1. One of the most difficult tasks during the first two years of medical school if you figure out what is most important to study.

To do this, I would use First Aid as a target for the information that you need to know. Also, remember to take a deep breath, and relax. Medical school is one of the most challenging times, but can also be greatly rewarding.

You are in for quite a ride. Thanks Alec for the response! I will keep in touch. Good luck in your future studies and endeavors!

Sounds fantastic. I definitely look forward to hearing from you more as you progress through your career! Hi Tamara, thank you so much for your message!

I have to Anki decks for sale, which you can purchase from the links at the top right of the website! Thank you again! Then a few months out to Step 1 in June focus more on Step 1 materials. Or did you focus on courses only, then started studying a lot for Step 1 in March, as that is when you took your first practice test?

Thank you all this great information on your site! Thank you very much for your message. I think that it is sufficient to begin your studies for Step 1 during your dedicated study period, as this is what I and many others that I know did. The most important thing is is that you take the time to improve your ability to APPLY that knowledge during your dedicated studying, not simply focusing on facts.

Hi Alec, Thanks for all the helpful information. I am taking my STEP1 in less than 6 weeks and was wondering what you think about doing Qbank blocks on random vs by topic?

I have been going back and forth on which approach to use as I feel like sometimes on random I am not able to really learn the information as well. Any advice is appreciated! Thank you so much for your kind words and question. If I could go back, and if I had a lot of gaps in my knowledge, particularly if those gaps were concentrated in a handful of subjects e.

I would just make sure that weeks out, I was doing random blocks again. Great post, I am taking your advice and getting through more questions via integration and application v. How many times were you able to get through First Aid during your study preparation? I was unsure how beneficial questions would be v. I will be able to finish it times MAX… maybe 1. I am not sure how to most efficiently manage my time, my exam is in 3 weeks.

To be more specific. I would appreciate any advice you have! Thank you so much for your great feedback and fantastic question. I did, however, want to respond ASAP given your short timeline. My goal was to make sure that I learned it well enough the first time that I never had to go back to re-learn those things. When I had weeks left, I was still focused on learning fewer subjects well, rather than trying to cover as much material as broadly as possible. Information without much depth never seemed to help me much, as well as students I have tutored.

Hope this helps! Just wanted to update you: I just published the new blog post here. Thanks again for your question, and I look forward to hearing your feedback on the new article! Outstanding blog, seriously! And very useful advice as well. I was wondering if you can share the copy of your study schedule for Step 1? Hi Stylish — thank you so much for your kind words and fantastic question. I hope to write an article about this at some point, but in the meantime, here are my thoughts:.

I made a schedule, but never really following it. Thank you so much for your clear, and fantastic feedback! Hi Jordan — thank you so much for your message! I really appreciate you taking the time to write and share your thoughts with the community. It really is quite amazing when you can actually FEEL yourself improving, particularly in your ability to understand and explain the human body.

I look forward to hearing more feedback about the site! First of all, thanks a ton for the articles and the blog. Its awesome! Thanks for the feedback! Great question — I made cards for both QBanks, mainly because they tended to focus on different information, and one gave better explanations for some conditions than others, and vice-versa. Just took my Step 1. I wish I had done spaced repetition earlier; only started doing it after I read your blog.

Hey Sidney — congrats!! Thus, thank you for your comment, as the more interest I can see in such articles, the more I want to write! It is virtually impossible to make all of those cards before getting through a reasonable number of questions before you have to take your shelf. Instead, I just did questions first, then studied the things I got wrong, and made cards to make sure I never made the same mistake twice — basically, the same approach as with Step 1.

Really looking forward to your upcoming article on this. How did seeing patients fit in with your learning for shelf exams?