just do zanki all day and memorize u world and you can score high enough not to barred from any specialty. that's all that matters. don't over complicate it. i did more "thinking" in my general physics 1 class than all of med school combined. ask a med student to explain why doppler tests for sickle cell patients looked for higher velocity in a narrowed arterial lumen. many will falsely cite poiseuille's law, if they cite anything, and be largely mistaken and not see the contradiction.
you don't have to deeply understand squat. I went from scoring 30th percentile my first year to 70 percentile my 2nd year (I calculated these based on means and SDs at my mid tier school that releases those after every exam but I go to a pure pass fail school), to 82 percentile on STEP1, to honoring all my clerkships with scores all in the 99th percentile on shelves (only exception was OB which was 95th and surgery which was 80th and barely honored because these were first couple clerkships) by changing my entire strategy to just doing thousands of flash cards and memorizing u world by high lighting stuff i didn't know and rerereading it a bunch of times. yeah sometimes i dabbled with goljan and devirgilios but looking back those were largely padding to make me "feel" more secure. When i saw shelf questions, I literally recalled the card and table that had the answer in it.
this **** is mostly glorified recall. btw at my mid tier school, we had some 260s and 270s applying to competitive **** get **** on and go to lower tier programs than people with 240s and 250s. it was obvious which personality types were hated on (think introvert, poor vocabulary and sentence structure, lacking in charisma, inability to think on the spot with weird questions because their minds were robotically setup only to cram facts and regurgitate...srs not srs... etc.)
Kaplan believe it or not has some of the most eloquent critical thinking style questions in pathophys and phys. They suck at everything else. Just like on the MCAT they were only good at the physical sciences section (old version)
U world straight up hunts for new guidelines (like giving ****ing hep A vaccine to younger than 41 but immunglobulin older than 41) to write questions. Yeah sometimes you see something interesting like electrical alterans, pulsus paradoxus, all the pressures equalizing in the chambers, etc is tamponade, but even that can be easily remembered and isn't intuitively hard at all to "get." don't get me started on arrhythmias and ACLS. if a the average 260 scorer can explain mechanistically well why CHADSVASC only applies to non valvular afib rather than a fib in general , I will be thoroughly impressed. Of course some can do that type of stuff. But many can't. That to me has consistently shown that deep understanding and rationalization of pathophysiology might help but is certainly not a requisite for scoring high.
@Newyawk you know how to pull my ass into these things lol. I really did enjoy some of our old discussions on the topic.
btw, I personally know two non URM males with low 250s scores and fair amount (not incredible) research that matched into elite tier (like top 5) uro and ENT residencies respectively. n=2 I know. anecdote I know. And a 250 is acheivable by pretty much anyone that meritocratically gets into med school. we can argue all day a 270 requires more "genius." but looking at the match, that is so impractical. the returns seem to be a lot more diminishing than people project on here.
Medicine is quite fair for allopathic MD students who get in meritocratically. they have the tools to succeed barring extremely extenuating personal circumstances and an extreme stubbornness not to conform to proven strategies.
)) hahahhaha.
