Great question! I’ve addressed this question before, particularly here: https://www.yousmle.com/nail-fundamentals-usmle-step-1-nbme-practice-exams/

If you have any other questions, let me know!
Alec

I’ve been a subscriber for a while and in general find your website useful, but I’m having an issue that you don’t explicitly address in any of your articles. I messaged you privately but you said (I’m assuming auto reply) that I should post on the website so here I am.

You said in another article that learning from the First Aid is very difficult/impossible and that one must understand the why and not just the what of things. Since First Aid just gives you a collection of facts it’s not the best resource to outright learn. I’m assuming the same applies to most/all other review books out there.

My education in my school hasn’t been all that great and I’ve made it worse by not applying myself more to my independent studies previously. So I wanted to ask you, how would you suggest approaching the learning of material? How would you suggest filling the knowledge gaps that I have? I bought your Anki decks a while back and while I find them very well made after trying to use them I found myself spending hours every day trying to do the normal 20 cards because I just didn’t know what the cards were talking about. I have a fair amount of USMLE books and other textbooks but there’s so much to cover that I just don’t know how to tackle it.

I want to learn a lot of the things I’m supposed to know but don’t to my lack of effort in the past. I want to actually learn those (many) concepts instead of memorizing them. If you could please give me some advice as to how to approach this problem I’d really appreciate it.

Thank you for your website and all you do and I look forward to your response.

Great article. I’ve loved this blog and it’s been incredibly helpful during my 1st year. Anki has been amazing. I did really well 2nd semester because of it. Could you do an article focusing on qbanks? (Kaplan and UWorld). Also could you discuss how you integrated them into studying during the school year and could you give pointers on how you approached a questioned you had gotten wrong and turned it into a flashcard. I feel that sometimes reviewing a TLE takes a really long time. Thanks so much in advance