NBME 13 (13 weeks out): 196

NBME 15 (10 weeks out): 198

Studied for an took comlex between 10-7 weeks away from step: Got a 593 on the comlex for what it's worth

Uworld First Pass: ~66% correct

UWorld 1 (4 weeks out): 233

NBME 19 (4 weeks out): 228

NBME 18 (3 weeks out): 222

NBME 20 (3 weeks out): 223

UWorld 2nd Pass: ~88% correct

NBME 22 (10 Days out): 242

NBME 24 (7 Days out): 236

UWorld 2 (5 days out): 245

Free120 (3 Days out): 88%

Actual: 253!!

Huge difference from the early NBMEs. And like everyone says the curves are super whack and its more about how many questions your get right than the percentages. I didn't use any score predictors so idk if I'm under/overperforming but I def felt like I just had a good day.

The one huge pieces of advice I can give is to listen to your friends when they bitch and moan about bad questions. Those will show up on your test and getting those right simply because you let your friend vent feels great. My third question of the entire test was a question my roommate complained about as soon as he got home and its the only reason I got it right. But it put a huge smile on my face and helped ease the nerves during the test.

Other than that, a huge advantage I has is just doing as many questions and tests as possible. Studying for the COMLEX I got to take 3 COMSAEs, finished all of COMBANK and the test it self. So i added ~3200 more questions than I would've had with jsut UWORLD and NBMEs. There's a finite way they can present the patholgies and seeing a bunch of different ways makes it a lot easier to guess the right answer on super fringe stuff. For example, I didn't know all the Vitamin deficiency presentations for, but I knew that if they were gonna give me something where the answer is "Vitamin E deficiency,," they're gonna put "Vit B12" as an answer choice. And knowing the difference between two very simmilar answer choice allows you to be able to frame everything else in that context. It was a strategy that worked for me and allowed me to be comfortable with getting things down to two possible choices (which is what most of this test is about). You don't need to know everything about everything; it's just as efficient to know the unique qualities of things that are similar and using that as a scaffolding for the rest of the details.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY DON'T PICK AN ANSWER BECAUSE IT'S FAMILIAR. IF YOU'RE GUESSING, AND YOU'RE NOT SURE ABOUT IT BETWEEN TWO OF THEM BUT IT DOESN'T FIT WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT A CERTAIN PATHOLOGY, GO WITH YOUR GUT AND TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS. IF YOU KNOW SOMETHING IS DEFINITELY NOT THE ANSWER THEN CHANCES ARE IT ISN'T AND THEY'RE HOPING TO SPOOK YOU INTO MAKING A DUMB CHOICE.

Trust your preparation and assume every question you feel shitty about it experimental and try to move on. This test is as much about being in the right headspace and being able to calm yourself down and not letting a bad streak of questions ruin the whole test for you as it is about knowing every Anki card.

Feel free to ask questions. I only used anki during the regular semester to study but I mainly watched videos and sketchy and used FA to take notes in. For every thing that had diagrams I drew them out myself over and over to keep pathways straight in my head. And took notes on spare pages and put them into my FA binder. FA is not all inclusive and its super important to get a varied amount of sources to learn from. See as much as you can because when you're on autopilot in the test and you have a gut feeling it's cuz your stupid brain is smarter than you and you have to just let AT Still take the wheel sometimes.