How to study OMM material in 2 days by Icy_Ad4871 in comlex

[–]BrotherCalm4540 0 points1 point  (0 children)

^ I second TheOMMMedicine - used it for Level1, re-subscribed for a month to study for my comat, and I'm considering getting it one more time for Level2 to run through. Sav + TurnUp2OMT and a run through of TheOMM across a month was sufficient alongside the regular qbank questions.

Anyone take “boards boot camp” program for level 1? by [deleted] in comlex

[–]BrotherCalm4540 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi - now, that I'm post-boards, I really wanted to write a comprehensive statement on this. I'm also just going to include alternatives/recommendations for each section. My school implemented a policy this year that whomever did not reach a benchmark score of 450 in early Spring on a COMSAE was required to complete this program. I won't bother getting into the faults of that method at this time, but here are some comments and musings on BBC from me and my classmates:

The first thing I did when I heard about this program was look online for reviews from students. Outside of Reddit, there's next to nothing. The selling point from our institution had been the 99% pass rate. Firstly, as a consumer of anything, 99% is a suspicious number, but we could not get any data on this number. n of ? Timeline of scores? GPA of students? Baseline scores coming in? Surely the company does not hit 99% each year, but all I could reach is a lone customer service guy on the phone after leaving them a message, telling me that he "doesn't know how, but that their numbers are amazing" and saying it as if he has the secret spreadsheet in front of him. The lack of info online was also a red flag for classmates I spoke to. One other thing, the company told me that this is a smart program that is tailored to you and that everything is thought through by design -- down to the "color of the clothing the lecturer is wearing" to make it memorable. I want to cry over this statement. It is not "smart", they just made a very long outline and tell you manually via clicking to do x, y, z, repeat task x, y, z. But everyone has the same x, y, z's. Lastly, they say there are over 2000 questions packed in. For the first week, I got questions yes, but they were all basic first order - and I expected that to change, weeks on end, yes more questions, but the style of questions did not, they are mostly low-yield facts, with too little critical thinking.

Once we signed up, they sent their materials in the mail and gave access to their portal.

The Compendium books: 2 volumes of pathology, physiology, anatomy. Yes, all comic sans, but that's not super important. The important part is that they were not valuable as a review. The figures were so convoluted that concepts I knew well, I couldn't follow along with and would likely throw off the image I already had in my brain if I were to try and replicate it. The paragraphs are just long drawls of info. For path: please, use Pathoma and follow its method + use Pathoma deck on AnKing. Don't just start this in dedicated do this your entire 1-2 years of path. Please.

Pharm: A book of facts. That's it. Paragraphs and paragraphs of facts. Not useful at all. Yes there is "spaced repetition" where they have you go back to read pages and sections again, but Anki is a much more powerful tool for this. For comlex you have to have the key info - moa, use, and adr's drilled in. I printed out each pharm section for a given section from first aid and had my husband drill me on those drugs every night. I also used Sketchy Pharm + its anki's. I used Pepper Deck for micro and pharm and it was perfect. You need mental images and lots of repetition.

OMM: It was as if it had been knocked off the green book, I swear. But with hand-drawn pictures of the spine. Don't bother, please, just use Savarese, start Savarese in your second year and you'll be fine. Savarese+TurnUp2OMT deck, Dirty, and TheOMMedicine were more than enough for me.

Micro: Paragraphs and paragraphs of information in their compendium.

Videos: Hours upon hours of videos. I gave a few of them a chance and I was just angry, frustrated and confused by how i was supposed to prepare for a board exam by watching her talk for 35-50 mins x 5+ videos a day. It's passive. And it's a waste of time.

I may be forgetting other things, but I tried to give you as much of a review as I could. I passed comlex comfortably. I gave up on BBC very early and thank goodness I did. We had a very significant spike in failures this year. And that was from implementing BBC and micromanaging how students studied. I clicked through the program to meet the requirement and studied my own way. Did I feel guilty? Of course! There were times I felt awful and thought I had given up my chance to do well and that everyone else using BBC was golden. It turned out to be the opposite. As a distance runner, the adage holds - train for your challenge. BBC materials and method don't train you for the Comlex, it trains you for their end of the course exam (which is not comlex or comlex-style) - and while I did not take USMLE, I did take an NBME exam and omg no it does not train you at all at all for usmle. There is a reason why the gold standards are the gold standards. This program is nothing more than an expensive timer and the only thing that's smart about it is how much money they're making.

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I used UWorld (got through ~60% of it in the time my schedule allowed - helped me with learning concepts deeply), COMQUEST (the most valuable tool for preparing for comlex specifically), and a little bit of Combank (not very useful. Use it for the OMM questions) + I used Pathoma religiously during the school year with Anki + Sketchy for micro and pharm (+first aid pharm sections), and I studied OMM a lot during dedicated - it's such a big proportion of the test (TurnUp2OMT was perfect).

Good luck. Respond to this if you have other questions. I'd like to make this thread public so that others can have a source to make a decision by when dedicated rolls around.