I put together this guide in the weeks following post-step and added bit by bit for the following months. I thought I had so much that I wanted to share with you all that I had to spend time to making the ultimate guide.
Just to be clear, this guide mainly focuses on what I found helpful and what I think was worth the time. Additionally it includes many tips that I have found online by doing my research and reading many various guide from people within SGU and from US students.
No one has the golden way to destroy Step 1 but everyone has unique way on how to prepare and what I want is to provide you with as much insight and rationale as to why I choose a particular method and furthermore I explain the other side of things so that you can make your own decision.
This guide is not the holy grail but rather just all my thoughts and everything in very high detail so that I can answer as much queries as possible and dissect every element of preparation.
Obviously it is very long and covers a lot of topics so don’t try to read it all at once but space it out as well as try to refer to it and any other guides whenever you are faced with a challenge
My primary goal is to arm you all with the information I wish I had so that time could be saved instead of experimenting on things which proved to be less than useful.
Something to keep in mind, specific advice about the exam tends to be unreliable since, if you think about it, people mostly take the exam once, which means everyone has a fair idea of what only their exam had on it. So in terms of advice on specific questions, I will stay away from. Instead I will comment on patterns and anomalies with which you should be aware of since they can throw anything at you on the exam.
So give each section a fair amount of time and never write off anything as “not going to show up” because for someone, they might have a pharm heavy exam while someone else may have an anatomy heavy exam. So be prepared for one or the other or a mixture of both.
I hope that this guide proves to be useful since I spent a lot of weeks trying to compile it.
Best of luck to everyone
The ultimate USMLE step 1 guide 
Hey Jaraad! I love your site! You have a bunch of really great tips and resources and I appreciate all the work you put into this. I was wondering if you could share some more information on how to use the mcq progress sheet. I think it could be very helpful but I am still unclear on what each category of boxes is for. Thanks!
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Hey Annie,
Wow, I haven’t visited this site in a long time, but I’m glad that people are still able to benefit from it
For the progress sheet, you use the table as follows –
1&2 column, you use these for your top two answers for the MCQ (whether it be A,B,C,D,E answer choice) – also feel free not to use both columns since it may be time consuming etc.
A column is for the correct answer
1/3/5 column is for how well you think you mastered the topic, 5 being you knew the answer right away, 3 if you had to narrow down and eventually reasoned it out and 1 is if you had a feeling and may have guessed
R/K/P/T/A – this is the reason you got the answer wrong, whether it be for one of the reasons mentioned
Once you are done with a block and review this, you will see exactly where your deficiencies lie and how you can improve
The rest is pretty self explanatory
Best of luck!
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