Block & Full-Length Strategies: Preparing for Success on Standardized Exams Stage 4 of 4
Before diving into the final phase, Stage 4 – Block & Full-Length Strategies, let’s review the steps that brought you here.
First, Capturing Core Concepts taught you the goal is not to memorize content or reinforce all concepts equally, but rather to make sure that it makes sense and to reinforce weak points + high-yield topics.
Second, Practice-Based Learning challenged you to realign your expectations on what “successful” practice means, then to develop your ability to compare the logical path outlined in each answer’s explanation to your question approach, identifying where you were on track and where you went astray.
Third, Pacing & Endurance encouraged you to (re)visit the data on your exam to set your Goal Score for Test Day. Next, you endeavored to get used to the pacing with short quizzes first, then progressively lengthen them. Lastly, you built the endurance to complete a full-length exam effectively, which included an analogy to ten endurance strategies used by marathon runners training for a competition.
This home stretch of your standardized exam preparation is where you’ll bring together all the skills you’ve been honing thus far, along with a few new strategies I’ll introduce, to focus on increasing both your full-length practice exam confidence and, ultimately, scores.
Stage 4 – Block & Full-Length Strategies
As you transition into the final stage of your standardized exam preparation, it is necessary to once again shift your mindset. Let go of both the need to maximize the learning from every question you take, and, instead, focus on maximizing your score in every timed practice block that you take.
Your first mission: seek and destroy the questions you’re most likely to get correct.
At this juncture, I would like to revisit the concept that the standardized exam is not the same as a typical academic exam, in which most questions are written around the same difficulty and your goal is to get nearly all of them correct. Standardized exams are instead written with two purposes in mind, both of which are designed to create a bell curve:
- For the average exam taker to score between 70-75%.
- For questions to be able to differentiate between the abilities of the exam takers along the entire spectrum of possible scores.
In order to accomplish the second of those objectives, exam makers must provide questions along the entire spectrum of difficulties. In other words, your exam WILL contain really easy, easy, easy-medium, medium, medium-hard, hard, and really hard questions.
Your second mission: don’t waste time and effort on harder questions at the cost of not getting to easier ones.
If you identify early on that a question will be more difficult or time-consuming, then skip the question entirely. If you find yourself invested in answering a difficult question but have already spent enough time on it, then take an educated guess, mark the question, and move on.
As you practice either taking multiple timed blocks in a row or completing full-length practice exams, learn to let go of each block as soon as it is finished. Fretting about how difficult a section felt or what you could have answered differently serves no purpose and will only worsen your test anxiety. You need to let go of the section that is done, give yourself the time to decompress, and psych yourself up for the section that’s ahead.
Your third mission: take the full amount of allotted break time between each section to clear of your mind of what is done and focus on your strategies for the block ahead.
Repeat this process as many times as needed (USMLE Step 1 is comprised of SEVEN 60-minute blocks taken over 8 hours while USMLE Step 2 is EIGHT 60-minute blocks over 9 hours, FYI).
Remember, this is what you’ve been building towards. While it is difficult to retain your reasoning skills over an 8-9 hour standardized exam, this is simply holding a mirror to the reality physicians face every day. A doctor needs to their clinical reasoning to stay on point through the entirety of their shift, which often exceed 8-9 hour days.
A final insight that I hope helps put this in perspective, though…
EVERYONE preparing for your standardized exam is struggling and EVERYONE who succeeded on your standardized exam struggled. However, their struggles and their triumphs won’t be the same as yours.
Lean into the difficult, put in the work, and you WILL get there.
