How To Take Good Notes From USMLE World

USMLE World is undoubtedly the best study material out there for USMLE. Taking notes from the USMLE World can be little challenging.

I am sure most of you who are reading this post probably facing difficulty taking notes from UW. When going through the question it is hard to figure out what is important and what is not.

It’s even hard to ignore anything and you end up writing almost everything from the explanation, which is not productive at all. So, to deal with this I have a simple solution that worked wonderfully for me.

This usually works perfectly with kaplan lecture notes. But, it shouldn’t be a problem with any other materials.

What I usually do when going through UW is have my book ready, doesn’t matter which book you use, just have it open.

And whenever I go through a question first I try to answer the question and then I try to read that concept from the book before I read the UW explanation.

So let’s say I had a question about hyperthyroidism, after answering the question whether I get it wrong or right, I usually look it up in the book and then read the entire hyperthyroid section from the book.

And then I go back to UW and read their explanation. Once I am done reading both the book and UW explanation, I go back to the question stem and see what are the clue words for the right answer. I then circle those in the book and put a star next to them.

And then I go back to the question again and see what the right answer is and circle the right answer in the book and then I write next to that circle “ans”.

This way when I am going to read the book again I will know what UW asked and how they asked and what they wanted.

When it comes to the wrong answer choices, I usually read the UW explanations and don’t bother reading the book because I know UW usually asks something with those wrong answers in different question.

Some of the UW materials wouldn’t be in the book and I usually write the concept in the margin section of the book. Now this process can take time if you are doing UW for the first time.

And the good thing is, once you do UW second time, you wouldn’t have to take any notes since you will have most of the materials written down on the book.

I personally found this method very useful and it works perfectly. If you have any questions feel free to leave it in the comment section.

Good luck studying!