A massive problem in most higher education is receiving accurate and timely feedback on how effective our studying is. For medical students studying for the USMLEs, most feedback on how well you are doing comes from NBMEs. If your scores are going up, something you’re doing is working (although you often won’t know what). If your scores aren’t going up much – or even at all – something isn’t working. (And you likely still won’t know the problems or how to fix them).
To make it worse, most students take NBMEs less frequently than they intend. There are lots of reasons students don’t like to take practice tests – they don’t want to “waste” them, they don’t want to have a hit to their confidence by seeing a low score, they have had prior bad experiences, etc.
The consequence of having very infrequent measures of study effectiveness is that they often don’t know their studying is working until it is uncomfortably late in their preparations.
Text tutoring – and mastering a subsection and repeating short blocks until achieving ≥ 80% – aim to supercharge the feedback loop. If studying for the USMLEs is like learning to be a tennis pro, then:
The goal of text tutoring is to help you design the kinds of cards to be an absolute beast at everything you’ll need for your exam.
So practically, how will this work?
To continue our tennis analogy, the goal is to help you develop better techniques for identifying why you’re missing questions and making excellent Anki cards to address them.
Why learn how to make your own cards? Why not just use pre-made cards?
There are probably 20+ ways you can miss a question. A lack of knowledge is only one of them. You might not know how to interpret a particular set of labs. Or you may not have confidence in yourself and choose a less-than-appealing answer. Some people read too quickly and erroneously fill in the gaps with what they want to see. (e.g., choosing “pulmonary angiography” when they were looking for “coronary angiography”).
Creating your own cards can be an excellent way to design weakness-specific drills. You might be good at the mechanisms of drugs but struggle with interpreting labs – you can create cards to practice interpreting those labs in a clinical context. Or you might struggle with using the Hardy-Weinberg equation or statistics tests – you can design specific cards that will help you crush those questions on your exam.
Basically, every day, you want to send a smaller version of a formal Anki Audit.
Every weekday before 5PM PST, via text to my cell phone (612-816-8916), please include the following:
Text tutoring should be a continuation of the work you are doing in Never Forget, to help you refine the basic techniques you will be learning in the program. Specifically, prior to starting Text Tutoring, you should have completed at a minimum:
Required:
Recommended:
