Improving on a weak subject

As part of your preparation for any USMLE exam, you should have a good strategy to increase your potential by preparing your weaker subjects and making them as strong as your favorite topic. Many students have made the same question how do I make a strong topic from a weak one, this week we will give some helpful tips to increase your strength in difficult or weak areas.

Identify your weaknesses.

Everyone has a topic they don’t know much about or don’t like at all, that’s ok. We all have strengths and weaknesses in our preparation, to identify your own weaknesses there are three ways to know for sure you are not doing as good as you think.

1-Pick the topics you really dislike, surely enough you have a couple subjects you don’t like or even hate, from the list that is relevant to each exam. Take note of those subjects you didn’t like to study most commonly these are the subjects that you are weak in your preparation.

2-Look for the really hard topics, try and think the subjects you find the most complicated or the ones you always keep forgetting, these will be part of your weak spots.

3-Compare the topics included for the exam with your own preparation, some schools make more emphasis in some subjects while leave others in a relative low level, you should select from the list of subjects the ones that your school didn’t cover or did poorly. For IMGs generally medical genetics, behavioral sciences, ethics are different from the U.S. schools. Also EKG and microscopic images are not easy to remember.

Once you have identified your weak subjects, make a list of them and keep it in some of your review books, you will need to take some out after our next steps.

Make sure they are relevant.

Surely we have topics that are not our strong side, like for me its oncology, it keeps changing and it’s hard for me, specially the pharmacology. Once you have a list of your relative weak topics it’s important to find how relevant they are for the exam. If they are not high yield topics you should not include them in your list. Some hard topics include only 2 or 3 questions, if this is the case you should leave them at the end of the list. 

Now you have a list of your weak topics and their priority in order. Next up find out if they really are your weaknesses.

Take focused question banks.

To be sure that you need more effort in some areas you should test them against a set of questions to see how good /bad you’re doing. There’s no point in assuming you are doing bad, you should confirm with a focused set of questions banks, as you go through those questions you will know firsthand if the questions make sense or not if you know what they are about or if it sounds totally new.

Take a 50 question test with a subject you think is one of your weaknesses, a score lower than half before studying should tell you there’s one that needs improving. Also it should be high yield to be important keep that in mind.

 Now your list is more real and priorities are in order, the next step will be to make a schedule taking into account what you know now.

Start from the lowest.

Everyone should make their own schedule and program the order of material to cover accordingly, even when courses, guides and reviews have their own order for the material of any step, you should make your own starting from your weakest topic to the one you can handle more easily, after all for the last part you may be a little exhausted.

If a topic results to be hard but is low yield leave it for the end, you should make the highest yield topics your priority, also in order from the weakest to the strongest, this way you will improve all around in every subject.

Remember to take into account images, charts, formulas, microscopy, diagrams and all sort of imaging that may be used for questions, it’s very important to know them by heart also you may find many questions using images just to confuse or distract from the real question, the only way to improve is by training against question banks.

Finish with a review.

After you finish your studying for each topic you should end it with a quick review. Other than morning reviews which we also advice to take every morning, you should perform at least a half day quick review of all the material for a given topic. Remember that it’s not just about remembering facts but understanding them as well, many questions will play with concepts to try and confuse and only by having clear concepts and not just knowing a list of details will let you answer correctly. So in your reviews you should be able to explain by yourself a given concept or a cycle, physiologic function etc.

We hope that these tips will be helpful to your preparation. If you have any questions or comments leave them below, and don’t forget to check our tutoring guides at www.usmleprepguide.com for a complete and detailed subject by subject guide for your preparation.