kaplan qbank and other usmle study methods

One of the resources I inadvertently overlooked when I wrote my post on how medical students are studying for Step 1 was the Kaplan QBank. Yesterday, one of my students told me that she and her classmates are all pretty much only doing Kaplan QBank questions from here on out to study. Yes, Kaplan has quite a monopoly.

I have so far refused to purchase Kaplan examination question books because they are so much more expensive than equally good examination books, but somehow Kaplan has convinced the entire medical school that their questions are the bomb. Maybe they are. Anyway, I had been hoping to look into getting a site license for it, but judging from the fact that an individual one-month subscription to the QBank alone (that doesn’t include the Vignettes section) is almost $200, I am thinking that my library isn’t going to want to or be able to cough up the money. Even though we’re a Kaplan center. I may consider calling them up and strongly suggesting that we get free QBank access in exchange for facilitating their center…

It’s fun to watch the students who have locked themselves in my library from open until close everyday to study for Step 1. They’ll be working through their QBank questions, get scored, and then realize, oops, I forgot everything involving biochemistry. Then, they’ll come and raid the bookshelves, read whatever review books they’ve picked up, and start the process again. Amusingly, they were complaining rather bitterly about one of their classmates who had checked out several key books and taken them back home (as in across the country home) to study.

One of my students who isn’t studying at the library came in yesterday, and told me that she has 2 study partners that are helping keep her on the studying track, 8-5 every day. One of the students who took the test last year (and passed, I may add), didn’t study once. Clearly, no one would advise following that path, but this student decided she didn’t want to play into the game of frantically studying non-stop for a month only to potentially boost her score a few points. Maybe she had a point–the second years I’ve seen at my library are looking rather pale and wan.

So, enough rambling–does anyone out there have a site license to QBank, and if so, is it worth it?