Internal Medicine Shelf Exam

I would love to tell you how to do well on this exam, but instead I'm going to tell you how I did, which is average, and how little I had to study.  My scaled score was a 75.

Now, I would have liked to do better, and I missed honors on this shelf by a few percent, but I'm here to set your expectations based on how I studied, so that you can do better.  Like I've been saying before, I'm a pretty average student, so most of you readers should get some benefit.  So here's what it takes to get an average grade.

First, start off your clinical year with internal medicine.  You won't know much of anything outside of step 1 material at this point.  Tell yourself how you're going to study really hard to do well on the shelf.  Start off strong by doing Pretest questions, and some Uworld questions.  Consider watching the Emma Holliday review video (link), and then don't actually watch it.  Consider watching the onlinemeded videos (link), and then don't actually watch it.

So far you're doing great, it's halfway through your clerkship, and you've done about 200/1200 of the medicine uworld questions, and about 1/2 of the pretest questions.  Most of your learning is being done at the hospital based on your patients and researching stuff on uptodate.

In other words, you need to kick it up a notch.  At this point you should get serious about studying.  Start breezing through uworld, and if you get something wrong, then learn that topic, and learn it well.  The books I used to learn stuff well was Case Files Internal Medicine, and Kaplan Step 2 CK.  I didn't even bother with Stepup, it's too dense for my liking.

Finally, you're in the last 10 days before your shelf exam.  You have about 300 uworld questions left, you stopped doing pretest, and you're only going to do the Emma Holliday review video because it's short.  Great! Now finish the questions, do 3 nbme practice exams, and watch the review video two times.  Take your test, and get an average score.

Next time:  How to honor your Pediatrics shelf because all it is is an internal medicine shelf.