Mccqe 1

[Leon]

Does anyone know how the scoring on the practice tests available on the MCCQE website (the ones for $70) translate to scoring on the actual test? eg is a 50 or 70 or 80% on the practice equal to >427?

Thanks!

[LittleDaisy]

I think that it is a good predictor of your performance on the actual MCCQE part 1, if you score around 60%, you should be fine attaining the 427 out of 950 point scale.

Some factors to take into consideration is that the practice tests are only 2 hours, less stress, less questions and you were in a more ''relaxed'' mood. Also, I didn't think that there were CDM questions in the practice tests!

 

 

Does anyone know how the scoring on the practice tests available on the MCCQE website (the ones for $70) translate to scoring on the actual test? eg is a 50 or 70 or 80% on the practice equal to >427?

Thanks!

[Leon]

I think that it is a good predictor of your performance on the actual MCCQE part 1, if you score around 60%, you should be fine attaining the 427 out of 950 point scale.

Some factors to take into consideration is that the practice tests are only 2 hours, less stress, less questions and you were in a more ''relaxed'' mood. Also, I didn't think that there were CDM questions in the practice tests!

 

Ok thanks, that sounds about right. Yea, practice test scores will inevitably vary somewhat from the actual for the reasons you mentioned, haha.

[psychiatry2017]

For pediatrics, would you guys recommend to read the entire section of PEDS (96 pages) in Toronto Notes?

Some topics covered in Peds Tnotes are not ''relevant'' for MCC objectives, for ex:  resp, hematology-oncology, nephrology, neurosurgery, etc...I don't know if it's better to rather focus my attention on solely dedicated MCC ped objectives??

In the best world, I should read the internal medicine sections for heme, nephro, resp, neurology, etc...but clock is running against me...

 

Anyone who has any advices to give concerning studying LMCC part 1 under 2 weeks,  would be greatly appreciated!

[Clover_236]

For pediatrics, would you guys recommend to read the entire section of PEDS (96 pages) in Toronto Notes?

Some topics covered in Peds Tnotes are not ''relevant'' for MCC objectives, for ex:  resp, hematology-oncology, nephrology, neurosurgery, etc...I don't know if it's better to rather focus my attention on solely dedicated MCC ped objectives??

In the best world, I should read the internal medicine sections for heme, nephro, resp, neurology, etc...but clock is running against me...

 

Anyone who has any advices to give concerning studying LMCC part 1 under 2 weeks,  would be greatly appreciated!

I'd read the entire peds section, all of the subsections in TN peds can show up in bits and pieces, and its generally a high yield chapter to go over.

(Granted I just wrote my lmcc, so aside not feeling overly shitty afterwards, I have no idea how it worked)

[psychiatry2017]

Hey thanks for your advices!

I am reading over the high-yield sections in TN twice: public health, ethics, obs&gyn, psy and peds, I am completely disregarding internal medicine. I will do my best to read over the surgery subspecialties..but so many lol! So far, I just aim to pass

For LMCC, all my friends who wrote it so far felt terrible after the exam. It is an adaptive exam, so they will start to give you difficult questions once you score fairly well in one discipline. I.E, you never feel good, but questions will be either brutally difficult or super easy, which is not a good sign either!

 

 

I'd read the entire peds section, all of the subsections in TN peds can show up in bits and pieces, and its generally a high yield chapter to go over.

(Granted I just wrote my lmcc, so aside not feeling overly shitty afterwards, I have no idea how it worked)

[gsmith]

 

For LMCC, all my friends who wrote it so far felt terrible after the exam. It is an adaptive exam, so they will start to give you difficult questions once you score fairly well in one discipline. I.E, you never feel good, but questions will be either brutally difficult or super easy, which is not a good sign either!

 

sounds about right

[psychiatry2017]

For people who didn't have enough time to read over internal medicine sections, and surgery subspecialties, how did you quickly approach those two big sections with limited time of studying (<4 days lol)?

Qbanks? Essentials? 

Thanks everyone

[Clover_236]

Hey thanks for your advices!

I am reading over the high-yield sections in TN twice: public health, ethics, obs&gyn, psy and peds, I am completely disregarding internal medicine. I will do my best to read over the surgery subspecialties..but so many lol! So far, I just aim to pass

For LMCC, all my friends who wrote it so far felt terrible after the exam. It is an adaptive exam, so they will start to give you difficult questions once you score fairly well in one discipline. I.E, you never feel good, but questions will be either brutally difficult or super easy, which is not a good sign either!

I think a good piece of advice is not to get too worked up over it adaptive style. The truth is the differences in easiness/difficulty of the questions from subsection to subsection is rather small (it also says this on the lmcc website), and it is almost impossible to tell for sure if your questions are getting easier/harder if you just happen to get some random questions that you know or some that don’t know from lmcc’s enormous question bank.

For the most part, the lmcc questions are neither ridiculously easy nor ridiculously hard, they are just ridiculously vague! Everyone feels like shit afterwards, just to varying degrees.

[smthg]

Didn't go over all of internal med and surgery - studied only the keys and high-yield stuff (i.e. diabetes, hypo/hypernatremia...) and the things I knew I didn't remember from med school. I also went over our school's review lectures as well as our pharma classes, which was super useful + read the high-yield TNotes sections and fam med/emerge once - twice for obgyn and peds. I also did 3 SAE for which I had great scores mostly over 60% overall (and rare <30e percentile in some sections, esp. internal med) and a bit of Qbanks. All in all, studied for 1.5 weeks around 12h a day + rewatched our review classes the week before the intense studying.

Even at that, there were quite a lot of questions we never ever covered in med school/review classes, especially in surgery! And incredibly weird public health questions (and we had a 1000+ slides class that was VERY comprehensive). The questions are indeed super vague sometimes and you absolutely don't know what they want - especially the CDMs. There are some weird translation hiccups in the French exam too. I did feel super shitty for two days afterward... but then again, felt the same after every exam this year. Best word of advice is to get a good night's sleep before your exam and not study the day before : I just flailed around half studying instead of relaxing.

UPDATE : Passed comfortably over the mean. Only section under the mean was internal medicine which I didn't study...Don't get caught up if your questions are easy or not... I thought mine were getting REALLY easy towards the end which made me freak out but it worked out in the end.

[samy]

 

Even at that, there were quite a lot of questions we never ever covered in med school/review classes, especially in surgery!

 

Wrote it 2 years ago and found that a lot of the IM knowledge came from clerkship rotations and not from my pre-clinical knowledge or studying. I still remember the question with a picture of a secondary syphilis asking for the treatment. If I had not had seen it at the hospital, I would have had missed it completely.

[ellorie]

It was a bizarre exam.  I honestly felt like I'd never in my life seen or heard of some of the stuff, and somehow I still did well, so I have no idea where in my brain that stuff was coming out of.

 

I did QBank for medicine and surgery almost exclusively - did not review TNotes for those sections.

[distressedpremed]

It was a bizarre exam.  I honestly felt like I'd never in my life seen or heard of some of the stuff, and somehow I still did well, so I have no idea where in my brain that stuff was coming out of.

 

I did QBank for medicine and surgery almost exclusively - did not review TNotes for those sections.

 

Agree fully....I'm not sure if I'm an idiot or not because the difficulty spiked in one of the early sections then seemed to dive down and plateau for the rest. 

 

I used TO notes and UWORLD.  Found it a bit more like UWORLD than Qbank.  Qbanks' logic for answering some of the answers were a bit weird. 

 

The second section was also really really weird... 

[Leon]

The trend seems to be that studying itself has subjective minimal benefit and the exam tends to test some random facts. I have a couple days left so let's see!

[Leon]

I'll post my experience today for what it's worth to future students.

 

I spent about a month reviewing lectures by my school and focusing on the usmle step 2 ck bank. I did a little review with toronto notes as well but didn't read all the sections relevant to the exam. I abandoned IM and surgery with the exception of a brief review of the Gen surg section in pestanas yesterday. I think it was mildly helpful. I definitely don't regret ditching internal.

 

Short of redoing clerkship I'm not sure what form of studying would have really helped with this exam. It felt like 7 hours of educated guessing haha. Some answers I knew only due to random comments by staff and residents during clerkship, I probably wouldn't have encountered that information in my routine cc3 or cc4 studying.

 

I'll update this post once I get my score next month. Good luck to those of you yet to write!

[LittleDaisy]

Hey guys just want to share my thoughts post-LMCC

1) Do the Qbanks, especially the CDM parts! I would suggest that for MCQ, do the blue and purple (MCCEE) difficult ones. Really time yourself, no more than 1 minute per question. We get free subscription through FMEQ, never tried UWorld, so can't comment. For the formats of questions, Qbanks are pretty representative IMO. 

2) The exam is really adaptive, it will never leave you with a feeling that you know most of the answers, don't sweat too much! Some questions are just impossible, or needs really more time to think lol!

3) I personally find studying with Tnotes is the best reference. Essentials lack a lot of information, only good if you don't have time, and for tables where they resume essential points. LMCC often quizzes us on small details, or ambiguous clinical decisions (i.e: either you know or not, if you hesitate, don't overthink, go with your intuition)

4) For IM questions, don't waste too much time to calculate the corrected Na with albumin and glycemia, not worth your time!

5) If you lack time for studying, I would suggest skip IM (not worth it, sometimes, it's those small details, that you won't really remember even after reading it once on a flip of page) ! For surgery, focus mainly on Gen surg & trauma (but again, the surgery content might vary for each candidate)

 

For CMGs, I believe that the 95% of success rate! Don't over-stress, sleep and plan your study ahead of time!!

[MansionMD]

Deleted duplicate post.

[LittleDaisy]

75% for MCQ, 25% for CDM.

http://mcc.ca/examinations/mccqe-part-i/scoring/

A friend is asking what % the MCQ portion and CDM portion accounts for in the total score. Does anyone remember?

[MansionMD]

Deleted duplicate post.

[MansionMD]

Deleted duplicate post.

[hamham]

I learnt a lot from this forum, so I thought I share my thoughts about the MCCQE1 for future students.

1) Total study time: ~6 weeks, but only ~2h daily during the first 5 weeks due to elective commitments. I did intensive studying (10h daily) during the last 9 days. Rested the day before the exam.  

2) Reference material: Mostly from personal notes I made during clerkship. Used Toronto Notes mainly for the ethics, medicolegal and public health components.

3) QuestionBank: Only Canada QBank. I did the voluntary SAE offered by my school, but did not pay to do the extra SAEs offered by LMCC. No UWorld, since I have no intention of writing the USMLE. It's good practice, but nothing comes close to the actual MCCQE1. 

4) Post-exam thoughts: The MCQ exam was a challenging speed test. There was little time to think about the answers. Literally just went with my gut and pick the first answer that came to my mind after reading the prompts. This made me very insecure, since I was used to having more time to eliminate the wrong options instead of jumping right to the first answer that came to mind. I had no regrets though, since I was able to finish the exam just on time. The first 10 questions for me were very complicated IM questions that took a lot of time. Though it was adaptive, the difficulty of the exam remained fairly constant for me. Some of the question prompts were also very wordy. I thought I had very few surgery questions, but I definitely had lots of fairly challenging IM and ethical questions. In short, it helps if you are a fast reader. CDM was much better, since there was more time to think about the issues, but some of the questions were so vague and strange (stuff that I have never seen before despite having completed lots of generalist electives).  

 

In summary, I left the exam centre feeling very weird. Not sure whether I passed, but I hope I did b/c that is one exam that I hope never to write again.

[LittleDaisy]

     When I read the instructions for CDM during the exam, they want really specific answers...They didn't really mention if they want the dosage of Rx or not. If you know the dosage and administration, I would put it for emergency clinical situations...i.e: Labetalol I.V etc

   In the instructions, they specifically stated that they only accept generic names, I guess for fairness to IMGs writing the exam as same time as you. 

   When they give you a pharmacological question (MCQ), the name of Rx is only written in generic though.

      I don't know if the CDM questions are corrected by the computers or by a M.D (which will be very costly lol), I would personally give the most specific answer possible (that's what stated in the instructions).

How specific are the answers in the CDM? If you need to treat a hypertensive patient, what do you type:

 

Anti-hypertensives

Beta-blocker

Metoprolol

Metoprolol PO

Metoprolol 12.5mg PO daily

[Intrepid86]

In the instructions, they specifically stated that they only accept generic names, I guess for fairness to IMGs writing the exam as same time as you.

 

A drug can have several trade names, but only one generic name. To avoid confusion for all test takers, every general medicine exam (at least in Canada and the US) is written using generic drug names. The examiners also prefer generic drug names for answers, so it's clear that you actually know what it is.

[LittleDaisy]

The results are out!! Congrats everyone!!!

[Hanmari]

Adding to the collective pool of info on this obscure exam, courtesy to hamham above for the formatting:

1) Total study time: 4 weeks, of which around 2 weeks were on-and-off. Last 2 weeks were around 4-5h a day of review with a couple of cram days of 10h+.

2) Reference material: TO notes for obgyn, peds, psych, ELOAM, epidemiology. A bit of pestana's for surgery. Ignored IM/IM subspecialties altogether.

3) QuestionBank: ~100 questions of each specialty for CanadaQBank, did not finish any particular set. Bought UWorld, found it to be way too difficult, gave up trying to do it after a few sets of questions mocking my education and landing me in the single digit percentiles. Overall I didn't do too many questions because getting them wrong made me feel bad, so I just read TO notes over like five times and pretended I knew everything in it

4) Post-exam thoughts: Came out of the exam feeling terrible like everyone else, and just like everyone else convinced that no amount of studying would've prepared me for it. Ended up passing the exam comfortably.

TL;DR all the residents who told me not to sweat this terribad exam were correct. Write it on the first day, get it over with, go travel