How I passed Step 1 after 8 months of medical school using only Anking and UWorld.

High yield: you can download an Anki deck I made to supplement the Anking deck here, or subscribe to it on Ankihub here. It includes 53 cards based on First Aid 2023 that help with distinguishing between very similar conditions and presentations.

I started the Anking Step 1 deck in late August of first year and did 150-200 new cards everyday. I finished all new cards by late January and fully matured all cards by March.

I started UWorld 1/9, and ended with a 72% average when I finished on 2/22. I finished a review of my incorrect questions by 2/25. For the first few days I tried to make Anki flashcards of my incorrects but found this to be too time consuming. I also attempted to do a second pass but found I could still remember nearly all of the questions and was averaging 95%.

While UWorld helped me gain a deeper understanding of some concepts, and had high quality images that were missing from the Anking deck, it did not significantly improve my NBME scores. This was likely because the NBMEs mostly test surface level content.

• NBME 25 (Jan 2023): 84% correct
• UWorld Form 1 (Feb 2023): 73% correct
• NBME 27 (March 2023): 86% correct
• NBME 29 (March 2023): 87% correct
• NBME 30 (March 2023): 85% correct
• NBME 31 (March 2023): 81% correct
• Free 120 (March 2023): 81% correct

In the three weeks before my test I also did a complete read through of First Aid 2023 and the first three chapters of Pathoma 2021.

I took the test on 4/4 and felt that it was closest to NBME 31 and Free 120. It was similar difficulty to UWorld but questions were less convoluted. The previous NBMEs (25-30) were not as representative. I read on Reddit that question stems were much longer on the actual test but did not find that to be the case, and I finished each block in a similar amount of time as my NBMEs (40-50 minutes).