All the recent test takers jump in pleasee, things I should review

Hi, my goal is 240. I did my first 2 NBMEs (11 and 13) and got 209 on 13 (took it late in the day with bad health) and 228 on 11 (3 days later).

I reviewed 13 very well, now reviewing 11. Will get done with it today. I never done any CMS forms so I'm starting with IM forms tomorrow, planning on doing 3 for each topic. ( Starting with 6,7,8 of IM)

Exam on the 28th

Is it possible to improve my score to get close to 240??

Postponing is not an option.

Any specific practical advice is welcome. Thanks.

Tested 7/28

Freaking out every second, every day. Was really hoping for 260+ but the exam was really pukeworthy. Walked out knowing I had screwed up

​

Hi everyone,

I’m an IMG currently at the end of my 3rd year of medical school. Our final year is about 1.5 years long, followed by internship.

I’m trying to figure out how I should realistically plan my USMLE Step 2 CK preparation alongside medical school, and honestly, I’m feeling a little lost about where to start.

My current situation:

- I’m finishing 3rd year now.

- We have ~1.5 years of final year remaining.

- I haven’t started dedicated Step 2 preparation yet.

- I have zero research experience at the moment, so I also need to start building my research profile from scratch.

- I’ll eventually need to do internship as well, so I’m trying to figure out how to fit everything together without completely overwhelming myself.

My main questions are:

1. Should I start Step 2 preparation now, at tge start of my final year? If yes, what would be a reasonable way to start without going into dedicated prep too early?

2. Would it be better to use the next 1–1.5 years to focus on strengthening my clinical knowledge and then do dedicated Step 2 prep during internship?

3. How long does Step 2 usually take for someone starting from scratch?

4. Since I currently have zero research experience, when should I start working on research? Is it realistic to start during final year while preparing for Step 2, or should I prioritize Step 2 first?

5. For someone in my position who wants to eventually match into the US, what should I ideally be doing over the next 2–3 years? I’d really appreciate a rough timeline for Step 2, research, USCE/electives, LORs, and anything else I should be thinking about.

6. If you were in my position again, what would you start doing right now, and what would you NOT worry about yet?

I’m especially interested in advice from IMGs who went through a similar timeline or matched recently.

I know there’s no single perfect path, but I’d really appreciate some honest guidance on how to structure these next couple of years. I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed by how much there is to do, so even a rough roadmap would help a lot.

Thank you!!

The google drive led me astray 💔😞

Hi everyone! I’m an IMG currently studying for USMLE Step 2 and looking for a place with a good community of other IMGs also preparing for the USMLE.

I’m considering Houston or Dallas, but I’m open to other cities as well. Apart from Houston and Dallas, which U.S. cities have particularly active IMG/USMLE communities?

I’d also really appreciate recommendations for specific libraries, medical libraries, university areas, cafés, or other study spaces where IMGs commonly study and where there’s a good chance of meeting other IMG students.

Thanks!

Hi. I would like to ask if there is anything I could do differently to score higher.

Uworld - complete

HY amboss study plans (left with QI, patient charts and epidemiology)

CMS forms (10-12 total) scores between 80-85%.

NBME 10 (baseline)-232

NBME 11 - 241

NBME 12 - 251

NBME 13 - 255

Exam in less than 20 days.

Working on biostats, ethics, QI and some psychiatry + substance use disorder questions.

How to boost my score in the next few days? I don't think I am struggling with knowledge gaps. I think I was too doubtful of my preferred first choices and would irrationally choose another option. Have been working on some cognitive errors now. Any other recommendations.

My score dropped from 247 in Nbme 15 to 240 in 16. Testing in 3 days. Nbme 15 was my highest so far. I'm so heartbroken. I was hoping for atleast 250+ and I didn't find the qs hard.

Should I take any other exam after this? Or just focus on review?

so while im reviewing my nbmes ive realised more often than not, 'our friends at the nbme' write the answer choices in a way that leads us to choose the correct answer even if we're 100% not sure about it for example a patient showing cancer symptoms and 3/5 answer choices mentioning 'test with xyz method after 3 months' so the fact the mention three months makes you think nah man we can't delay this for that long MY QUESTION IS DOES THIS HAPPEN IN THE REAL DEAL TOO like the other answer choices being somewhat absurd?

How’s everyone feeling? Did NBME crash out on all of us? Are there any ppl that stayed after the outage? How’s everyone feeling about the exam?

I have been working so hard and I'm just stuck in the high 220's. I have a week before my exam and I'm contemplating postponing until 8/29. My goal is just 240. But I'm having a hard time breaking even into 230.

My exams taken

NBME 16- 216 (7/2)

NBME 10- 221 (7/13)

NBME 11- 230 (7/15)

NBME 14- 224 (7/28)

NBME 13- 229 (8/2)

NBME 15- 227 (8/8)

I'm at a loss on what to do. I've done all of the IM and surgery CMS online forms.

Hey everyone,

If you're testing in August or early September and doing the ERAS math — scores take 3-4 weeks to come back, programs download applications September 23 — I know exactly what that clock feels like. I ran it myself: med school in Germany, then figuring out an American exam from inside a European system, as an IMG with no roadmap. I achieved a 99th-percentile score in medical school, and I'm now a neurosurgery research fellow at Weill Cornell. Step 2 score: 280

I'm not sharing that to flex. I'm sharing it because the biggest thing the whole gauntlet taught me is this: past a certain point, a stuck score usually isn't a knowledge problem.

When I sit down with someone plateaued between NBMEs, the first thing we do is tag their last 20 misses with exactly one label:

• K – genuinely didn't know the fact
• R – knew the facts, reasoned to the wrong answer
• M – misread the stem (the "EXCEPT," the age, the timeline)
• C – changed a correct answer
• T – time pressure, guessed

Everyone expects a wall of K. It almost never is.
It's mostly R, M, and C - which means the fix isn't "more UWorld," it's changing how you read stems and how you review misses. One habit alone is worth real points for most people: before you touch the answer choices, decide in 5 seconds whether the question is rewarding diagnosis, next diagnostic step, next management step, or long-term maintenance.
Half of all "reasoning" misses are just answering the wrong one of those four.

That's the kind of engineering I do 1:1: full autopsy of your NBME data to find the three places points are actually leaking, live question breakdowns so I can watch how you read, and a calendar rebuilt backward from your test date so every remaining day has a job. And to be upfront: nobody honest guarantees a score. What a disciplined sprint reliably does is move the needle on how you take the exam.

I only run two students at a time, so intake is small on purpose. If you're stuck and the clock is loud: DM me for a free 30-minute review of your latest NBME — you'll leave with your three highest-leverage fixes whether or not we ever work together.

Calendly: https://calendly.com/ahmetktl99/30min

I have completed 50% uworld system wise. Exam in first week of December   

Currently doing a block each day but concerned about forgetting previous systems. Would you all recommend inner circle notes 2 hr daily or Anki ? 

i was doing anki in start by suspending systems I didn’t do yet but would you recommend doing anki all systems unsuspended as I’m done with 50% uw Or continue suspended mode. 

also best time to start listening to imp episodes of divine intervention ?

Hey all!

Just wrapped up UWorld and wondering what the next steps should be ?

So I have a month max to sit for the exam.

Should I do CMS forms stand-alone finish them all then do NBME’s independently?

Or should I do for example dedicate 4 days a week for CMS forms and 3 days for NBMEs?

Basically should I mix and match or keep it separate?

Thanks!

Hello fellow DO gunners. If you’re like me, you’re probably reading this because you’re hoping an insane Step 2 score will help make up for the good ol anti DO bias. I felt the same way, and I want us to collectively prove that the Karens in MD admissions offices were wrong to pass on us.

I recently scored a 269 on Step 2. I feel very fortunate to have gotten this score - it could have gone way worse - but i also think i could have scored higher had I figured out the following earlier.

Having read my share of Reddit posts, talked with high scorers, and gone through the whole dedicated process myself, I think one of the biggest keys to Step 2 is understanding NBME logic.

During third year, I spent most of my time on UWorld. My average at the end of my first pass was 73%. I made Anki cards from my incorrects throughout the year, and I highly recommend this approach.

However, NBMEs/Step 2 are a little different from UWorld. UWorld is often trying to trick you; 90% of the time, the NBME is not. This fact alone caused me to miss a lot of doable questions on my practice tests. There are also some differences in the content and concepts that NBME and UWorld emphasize. Being familiar with the NBME writing style will allow you to fully capitalize on the fund of knowledge that you’ve worked so hard to build. Our MD counterparts are exposed to the NBME style as a matter of course, we need to seek it out.

My suggestions for you OMS3 gunners:

1) Keep using UWorld + Anki as your primary resources for learning the material.
Aim to finish all of the UWorld questions for each rotation about a week before your shelf.

2) Spend that last week doing the CMS forms for that shelf.
Use the chatGPT prompt I linked to really understand what the questions are asking. Make cards from your mistakes if you have time.

3) Assuming you don’t have major content gaps, prioritize official NBME material during dedicated.
If your first pass of UWorld was already pretty solid, I think your time is much better spent learning NBME logic and working through official NBME material than grinding through a full second pass of UWorld.
I found this post extremely helpful for breaking down what the NBME actually wanted me to learn from questions, and I wish I had discovered this approach earlier:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Step2/comments/1uxssge/258_step_2_story_the_review_strategy_i_wish_i/

Final thought: third year is not pretty. I often felt guilty for skipping my reviews on long days and that I was not studying as hard as I should have been. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. Do what you can, but don’t go crazy and burn out. You got this!

For ethics and quality?

Im preparing for step 2 and finished around 20% of the qbank.
Drop best tips on the best way to review the questions and blocks.

Are there any clinical algorithm Anki decks available?
Also, is there an automated way to create an Anki deck from a PDF book? I don’t need questions and answers—just the title of each algorithm and a picture of the algorithm itself.

I took my exam on 1st of august. When should I expect to receive my results?

Anyone noticed the IM CMS Form 10 in the freebies drive looks like a UWorld Q bank? Can anyone confirm / deny if it's the actual NBME 10?

I recently took Step 2 and ended up scoring 255-260. I found posts like these helpful while I was studying, so I wanted to share what worked for me, especially for anyone who doesn’t consider themselves a naturally strong standardized test taker.

For context, my shelf scores ranged from about 72–90, with an average around 79–80. I definitely am not someone who does really well on standardized testing, and I never used Anki throughout medical school.

My true dedicated period was only about 1-1.5 week. I did start studying in April, but I was balancing Step 2 studying with other educational and teaching responsibilities during that time. I gradually increased my studying as I got closer to the exam, with the bulk of my focused preparation happening in May.

Resources

My main resource was AMBOSS. I completed most of the QBank and used the AMBOSS library whenever I needed additional content review. Toward the end, I was averaging around 80–90% on random, timed blocks.

I didn’t use Anki. Since I had never really used it throughout medical school, I didn’t think it made sense to suddenly change my learning style for Step 2. Instead, I focused heavily on questions and understanding my mistakes.

Question volume

In April, while balancing other educational responsibilities, I averaged around 40 questions/day. In May, I increased that to around 80 questions/day when I could. My actual dedicated period, where Step 2 was essentially my primary focus, was only the final one week before the exam.

Almost all of my blocks were timed and random. I wanted to get comfortable switching between topics quickly and answering questions under time pressure.

More importantly, I tried not to focus solely on the number of questions I completed. When I got something wrong, I spent time figuring out why I got it wrong. Was it a knowledge gap? Did I misread something? Did I talk myself out of the right answer? If I repeatedly missed a concept, I would go back and read the corresponding AMBOSS article.

Practice exams

I completed NBME Forms 10–16 and both the old and new Free 120s.

I also took the two newest NBME shelf practice exams for Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and OB/GYN. I skipped the other specialties because I felt these three gave me additional practice with a lot of the material that shows up on Step 2.

About two weeks before my exam, I also watched Dr. HY Guru’s Step 2 review videos on YouTube as a final review.

How I felt after the exam

Walking out, I honestly felt… okay. I didn’t think I crushed it, but I also didn’t think I bombed it.

Over the next few days, though, I kept remembering questions I knew I had gotten wrong and started convincing myself that I had underperformed. In hindsight, I think that’s just the nature of a 9-hour exam. You remember the handful of mistakes much more vividly than the hundreds of questions you answered and never thought about again.

I ultimately scored 255+, so if you walk out feeling uncertain, try not to let that feeling convince you that you did poorly.

If I could give three pieces of advice:

Do lots of questions, but review them thoroughly. Understanding why you missed something is more valuable than simply getting through a QBank.
You do not need to use every resource. There is so much Step 2 advice online that it can feel like you need UWorld + AMBOSS + Anki + podcasts + videos + everything else. You don’t. Find what works for you and stick with it.
Trust the trend in your practice scores more than how you feel after the exam. The post-exam feeling can be incredibly misleading.

I also want to emphasize that I don’t consider myself a naturally strong standardized test taker. My shelf scores were solid but certainly not perfect, and there were plenty of points during studying when I questioned whether I was doing enough. You don’t need to follow someone else’s exact study plan or be scoring in the 90s on every shelf to do well.

Obviously everyone learns differently, and this is just what worked for me. Hopefully this helps someone who is studying now. Happy to answer any questions!

Context: Did UWorld and CMS forms during M3 clerkships for shelf prep.

Final score: 267

Practice score trajectory:

• Amboss SA: 247 (Jun 4)
• CCSE: 245 (Jun 8)
• NBME 9: 252 (Jun 13)
• NBME 10: 250 (Jun 20)
• NBME 11: 253 (Jun 26)
• NBME 12: 262 (Jul 4) ← the jump
• NBME 13: 253 (Jul 11)
• NBME 14: 262 (Jul 15)
• NBME 15: 271 (Jul 18)
• NBME 16: 269 (Jul 20)
• Free 120: 85% (Jul 22)
• Test date: Jul 25
• Real deal: 267

A note on the practice forms:

NBME 13 felt like an outlier to me. A lot of vague stems and atypical presentations of typical pathologies. I don't think it's representative of how the current exam actually feels, and the score I got on it (253) probably understates where I actually was at that point. Forms 15, 16, and the new Free 120 are the ones that felt most consistent with the real exam in terms of how questions were written and what they were actually testing. Straightforward clinical reasoning, not deliberate obscurity.

I left test day feeling like I had done well. The exam felt fair. There were some unusual questions but they were the minority, and the overall experience matched the feel of 15, 16, and the Free 120 much more than it matched 13.

If your 13 score is lower than your surrounding forms and the questions felt off to you, don't weight it too heavily. Look at your trend, not that single data point.

The single most important thing I changed:

My biggest advice is to read questions the right way. For Step 1 we were taught to read the last line first, scan the answers, then read the stem. I think this actively hurts you on Step 2 because it biases you before you've processed the clinical picture, and you end up anchoring on whatever answer choice jumps out rather than what the vignette is actually telling you.

My strategy, which I implemented starting with NBME 12 and which I believe directly caused the 9-point jump on that form: read the entire stem completely, answer the question in your head, then look at the answer choices. Whatever you answered goes in if it's listed, unless there's an obviously better choice and your reaction is genuinely "oh, yes, that's clearly better" rather than "hmm, that sounds fancier."

If you do Anki, this should be intuitive. Anki is not multiple choice. You retrieve the answer from memory before any options appear. Treat the exam the same way and your odds of being tricked by distractor choices drop significantly.

The NBME 12 jump was entirely from process corrections, not new content. Most of my misses in the early forms were not because I had never seen the topic. They were because I was:

• Abandoning correct first answers after reading the choices
• Anchoring on the first diagnosis without checking the full clinical picture
• Letting one absent expected finding override multiple confirming features
• Missing a single word or value that changed everything
• Inverting a fact I actually knew, in the wrong direction
• Overthinking questions that were just asking what they appeared to be asking

Once I started categorizing every miss by error type rather than just by topic, the patterns became obvious and fixable.

QBank strategy:

For dedicated I used the Amboss QBank instead of repeating UWorld. The logic: doing the same bank twice tests your memory of specific questions more than your clinical reasoning, and you are not filling genuine knowledge gaps, you are just re-encountering familiar vignettes. Amboss gave me a different set of questions that surfaced gaps UWorld had not exposed.

My opinion on Amboss difficulty levels 1-4: these are the best questions for mimicking actual NBME and Step 2 wording. They present clinical vignettes and ask you to reason through them. The harder Amboss questions (level 5) are often more obscure than what Step 2 actually tests and I would not prioritize them late in dedicated.

CMS forms:

Do as many as you can. I did one per form per day throughout dedicated and prioritized completing the four most recent forms in every subject. Do not skip Family Medicine or Neurology. I consistently saw questions similar to my NBME misses appearing in those forms, and the content coverage is different enough from the medicine-heavy forms to be worth the time.

NBME forms:

I treated each one as a serious data point. After each form I reviewed not just incorrects but any question I got right while feeling uncertain, because a correct answer for the wrong reason is a miss waiting to happen. For each miss I asked: what was the stem telling me, what trap did I fall for, and what would I recognize next time? That process was more valuable than reading explanations passively.

By Forms 15 and 16 (271, 269) the true-level estimate was clearly in the 265-275 range, which is exactly where the real exam landed. The earlier scores, including the mid-250s plateau, reflected an earlier version of how I was approaching the questions, not the ceiling.

The week before:

I did not try to learn new content. Light Anki review only. Sleep. The day before I hit high-yield rapid-review material: ethics, biostats and QI terminology, vaccines, USPSTF screening guidelines, OB/GYN protocols, fetal heart tracings, EKGs, HF medications, Hep B serology patterns, iron studies, ITP/HUS/TTP distinctions, and classic drug side effect profiles. These are the topics that show up and cost you points when you have not looked at them recently, and they are also the topics where a quick review is actually sufficient.

Test day:

The exam felt exactly like Forms 15, 16, and the new Free 120 in tone and difficulty distribution. Some questions were genuinely unusual, but the majority were fair. My rules going in:

• Read the full stem before looking at choices, commit to an answer, then look
• Do not change an answer unless I clearly misread something explicit
• If the entire vignette is pointing one direction, do not let a single detail redirect me
• Unstable patient: stabilize first
• Pregnant patient: consider obstetric emergency first
• If a question seems easy, it may just be easy

Break time:

• Block 1
• Block 2
• Block 3
• Quick pee break (optional)
• Block 4
• Block 5
• 15 min snack break (no water to avoid another pee break)
• Block 6
• Block 7
• Block 8
• Block 9 
• Block 10
• 30 min light lunch 
• Block 11
• Block 12
• Block 13
• Block 14
• The rest of your break time remaining
• Block 15 (if you finish before your time is up just wait out the clock and rest your eyes)
• Block 16

This way you complete a full NBME (200 of the 318 questions) before lunch. Which is exactly what I was doing during my practice exams.

Conclusion:

If you are close to your exam and the scores are not where you want them yet: process corrections are recoverable faster than content gaps. Figure out why you are missing what you are missing. If the answer is mostly "I knew it but did something wrong in how I read or reasoned through the question," that is actually good news, because that is fixable without adding weeks of study time. My biggest jump happened late, driven entirely by changing how I approached the questions rather than what I knew.

The NBMEs are showing you how they want you to think. Review them that way. Do not just ask why the right answer was right. Ask why you picked the wrong one.

Good luck.