Hi folks... I'm giving my step 3 in 2 weeks... I'd appreciate it if someone threw in some tips on how to not lose focus during the exam (and feel like pulling your hair out)

I thought I'd done a good deal of studying - I know my MTB and uworld step 3 pretty well.. I took the uworld self-assessment exam and was discouraged to find that I scored a 470/210... I also scored 75% on the usmle.org question blocks (I'd hoped to score at least 80%)

I guess my main problem was actually reading the questions and finishing on time... There's so much information there that I get so bored and have to force myself to read the details... I know that if I had a little more time to spend on each question, I could do really well...

MTB and uworld alone cannot thoroughly prepare you for this exam...

My advice, practice only in timed mode (not even timed-tutor)... Time constraint and lengthy questions are the villains in this exam...

Helpful tips and advice are welcome!

People who have taken this exam don't have a reason to return to the uworld site anymore! They'll be like - Good riddance!

Anyways, I feel the same way - it's more stressful to read questions more than anything else. I read somewhere that you should eat nutritious food and get good sleep...

1)I din't read each and every tiny detail given in the question. I rather skimmed through the question to pick up any abnormal finding mentioned. I guess it helped me a lot during the exam.. Practice doing that by re-doing the uworld even if u got just a week or so.. It helps..

2)In the real exam, I tried not to try to score each every question. What I meant was, most of the questions in the step 3 are protocol based as you might have observed in uworld qbank. If the answer dint strike to u right at the beginning, there s 90% chance that it wont strike even after u give the question a whole 1-2 mins of thought. I just marked whatever I FELT was right and moved on to the next question. It really helped me a lot.

3) Practice CCS. A decent performance in CCS will help you. And its easy to give a decent performance by repeated practice.

Good Luck to you!! I dont mind any further queries.