Each of the founders of LectureBoss has over 20 years experience with USMLE exams, and we’ve been fascinated by the challenge of how to compress your first two years of medical school into a couple of months of lectures and how to most effectively teach and retain this material in a short period of time. 

Most of the students we prepare have forgotten 80% of the material by the time CBSE/Step 1/COMLEX 1 arrives. So there’s no time to waste and every minute must be optimized. Every one of our students wishes he or she had more time to prepare when test week arrives. The lectures we present to prepare you for NBME exams are different than those for medical school or what you might watch online. There isn’t time for full lectures on each subject; you’ll never get through the material.

Some of you are here because you didn’t pass CBSE/Step 1/COMLEX 1 on your first, second, or third attempt.  That’s ok. Sometimes it just takes the right teacher with the right approach. The important thing is that you’re trying something different now and you should rest assured that we will leave no stone unturned to get you to pass. This passion for teaching is why we have unparalleled success with students on USMLE exams.

We are all about getting results and substance and we have chosen a format that maximizes fact volume.  Our students who succeed at all levels of USMLE exams have a well-rounded depth of facts on all subjects and can recall them under pressure. These are goals we have for you, and the combination of our notes and lectures will help you achieve this.

When we first meet many of our students say that test-taking anxiety is their main problem or the wording of questions confuses them; that their struggles on the test are not due to lack of content knowledge. But when we begin quizzing them on details, they just simply don’t have enough specific knowledge to answer these highly-detailed USMLE questions.

We’ve never had a student who consistently answered all of our questions under intense pressure not pass this exam. When a student answers seven or eight questions in a row, we know they’re going to pass.

Another common problem we encounter is that students are too relaxed at home during the preparations and never put themselves under stress. The first time they feel stress is on test day. But it’s important to feel some stress and pressure before the real exam, to become desensitized, and we hope to give you just the right amount of that.

During our lectures, every topic we discuss will come from:

1 . A recent USMLE test (Step 1/CBSE/COMLEX/clinical shelf/Step 2).

  We have a high volume of students taking these exams every week and we get feedback on topics that are heavily tested.

2 . USMLE self-assessments. 

    There is a collection of almost 10,000 actual USMLE questions from Step 1 assessments, shelf exams, Step 2, and Step 3. 

The questions we ask are based on data collected from hundreds of our students from different medical schools and of all levels.  How well you answer our questions will give you an accurate idea of how you will do on a USMLE test day.  Our chief instructor Dr. Avarbock will find the most challenging and interesting ways to question you and connect topics to see if you really know the material.

We’ve seen Step 1 questions appear on shelf exams and Step 2/3 exams, and vice versa. When we tutor students, we give them a breakdown of questions from shelf exams, Step 2/Step 3 that can also appear on Step 1, and vice versa. So many of our lectures, though listed as a shelf or Step 2 lecture, can also help for Step 1, and vice versa. We will notify you about these crossover lectures.

The questions and the descriptive terms of diseases we use will not come from review books. This is why USMLE questions sound confusing: students are used to the bullet points from First Aid or Kaplan, but the USMLE is drawing on descriptions from textbooks like pathology books. So descriptive terms don’t sound like the information you’ve reviewed.

You may hear some teachers or videos tell you that this topic or that topic isn’t important just because it’s not on a self-assessment or in a review book. That’s incorrect. There are a lot of topics that students have related to us after taking a USMLE exam that have been asked five times or more that are not on self-assessments. There are a total of about 100 self-assessments for Step 1, shelf exams, and Step 2.  However, in the past 10 years alone, they have administered over 3000 USMLE exams, consisting of over 500,000 questions. So you can safely assume that almost every fact has been tested, and you should approach your studying with this in mind.

Every fact is potentially important. On test day, you may get an easy question on an obscure fact that you can answer, versus a very difficult question on a common topic. And you need to answer at least one of them right. 

If you only learn the ‘bread and butter’ and ‘high-yield’ topics for this test, that will barely get you to the 70% required to pass. You must cushion your score with some more esoteric topics as well.

There is a lot of randomness in the test because they have to make a new test for every day of the week. We have had some students referred to us over the years with good knowledge who didn’t pass; perhaps they got a bad test with many esoteric questions; if they took it 10 times they would’ve passed 9 out of 10 times, but perhaps the exam tested the 20% of knowledge the student didn’t know. Our job is to prepare you so that you have the best chance of passing 10 out of 10 times. We don’t roll the dice with our students and their future.

Many students only learn 70% of the content they are required to learn, and they pray that the examiners don’t ask them the 30% that they don’t know. If you say,  “I’m not going to study embryology, histology, equations, or other topics I’m uncomfortable with,” it will start to add up and put you in danger of not passing. During the sessions, we will seek to expose you to as many topics as possible in a short period of time in order to uncover these weaknesses in your knowledge.

Some topics covered during sessions will be split between two sessions because they are too vast to be covered in one session, such as infectious agents and anti-microbial drugs.

We urge you to close your books during the sessions and to force yourself to concentrate and follow the questions. This will help discipline your mind and hone your concentration. Test day can be disorienting, where you lose your focus and misinterpret questions.

Students are now used to having an electronic device at their fingertips if they don’t know the answer to something, and they don’t really force their brain to remember the information.  This leads to insecurity on test day when they can’t lean on this crutch.

It takes training to develop a good memory, especially when you’re under pressure, and you must force yourself to try to recall and to develop good strategies if you can’t. Our sessions will constantly challenge your memory and analytical skills.

USMLE exams are 50% knowledge and 50% confidence, physical stamina, and test-taking technique.

Many of our students will say, “I can’t tell you the answer, but I’d recognize it if I saw it as an answer choice.”  However, if you do know the answer without looking at the answer choices, it will save you time, and test writers have a way of changing the description of the answer so that you don’t recognize it.

We will work with you on the process of eliminating answer choices until you’re left with the best option, and perhaps you don’t recognize or understand that answer but it’s the only one that makes sense.

Before each session, prepare yourself like you’re taking the real exam, and try to anticipate tangents that we or the real exam may ask. USMLE questions often start on one topic and go in a completely different direction and you must anticipate that, and our sessions will prepare you for that.

Having someone guide you during your exam preparations and make you accountable each day for making improvements and gains in your knowledge is critical, and LectureBoss is here to oversee that. We assure you that you will end each day more knowledgeable than the day before. And this knowledge will be realistic USMLE-based knowledge. You have a limited window of preparation and there’s no time to waste. So let’s get to it!