Customer Reviews

MKSAP For Students 4 (Mksap for Students, Alguire)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is supposed to be designed to help you do well on the internal medicine shelf. It was recommended by a good majority of my senior classmates. What it really does is test how well you know the latest and greatest info on particular diseases. In other words, the impression that I got from this book is that it was trying to teach you the latest material from journal references rather than trying to teach you basic internal medicine. After finishing MKSAP 4 and MKSAP 3, I felt like I was successful in rounding up a bunch of random details about medicine. It didn't help me understand any basic algorithmic approach to treating, nor did it help me understand how to work up a condition. In retrospect, I wish that I had never touched this book. Yeah, I learned the material in it and I did well on the questions, but it didn't teach me what I needed for the shelf, nor did I get a really firm grasp on internal medicine from this book. I would have been more satisfied with another source.

I found this book to be very helpful in studying for the shelf (better than PreTest). The explanations are typically quite good and quite long. They provide a very short bold bulleted key teaching points answer as well, which is helpful if you are confident in your answer and trying to get through a number of questions quickly. Some of the questions reference color path plates at the back of the book.

The book is divided into chapters as follows:
Cardiovascular Medicine
Endocrinology and Metabolism
Gastroenterology and Hepatology
General Internal Medicine
Hematology
Infectious Disease
Nephrology
Neurology
Oncology
Pulmonary Medicine
Rheumatology

If you are curious the 4th edition and 3rd edition are very different.

If you have access to the CD from someone else use it as it has all the questions on there and lets you track your progress (and do questions in a random fashion as you would see on the shelf). This question book helped me honor the IM shelf and felt the questions were relatively close to the shelf. I'd recommend this for a question book during the rotation.

i think you can use this as the sole source for the shelf in terms of dedicated study material. of course you'll get most of your learning on the ward and reading on your patients, but at the end of the day when you're tired, have limited time, have a list of patient related topics to cover for the next day, and maybe other assignments, doing 20 or so questions is far more reasonable than trying to read a chapter or outline in some book. this highlights the testables, i went through all of the questions once, and hit most of it a second time and scored in the 92nd percentile on the shelf. blueprints and case files were far less helpful. the cd rom software is really nice bc it lets you track your progress...and one disk can be installed on unlimited computers...

My IM rotation is from 6am-6pm with one weekend call each week, which means there is no way I could go through step-up for my shelf exam. This however was recommended highly by my chief resident so I went through this instead. I haven't gotten back my shelf exam score yet but I would say the topics covered here was very high yield. I would highly recommend this for the IM shelf exam.

I love this book. I went through the questions after reading relevant chapters in Step Up to Medicine - the two books are so alike in content I am convinced the MKSAP 4 questions are based on Step Up or vice versa. I think the questions are good for reinforcing basic concepts as well as much more detailed bits that I probably would have otherwise not read about. There is a good mix of diagnosis and management-focused problems and I found this particularly helpful for committing treatment algorithms to memory.

If I could do year 3 over again I would have used Step Up to Medicine and MKSAP 4 from the beginning of the year and not bothered with most other books or my school's lame study guides.

I bought MKSAP 3 as well but have only gone through a couple chapters. I like MKSAP 4 better because of the way the material is grouped - by organ system in MKSAP 4 (cardiovascular, pulmonary, renal) versus by presenting complaint or disease in MKSAP 3 (dyspnea, chest pain, CHF, DVT). I prefer not knowing what the diagnosis is before even reading the question!

I used this book towards the end of my medicine clerkship to help me for the NBME medicine shelf exam. It's more useful at the end when you just want to do questions to help you figure out what areas you need to focus on. Also it's nice to bring with you on wards (even though it's a thick book) because you can do a few questions when you have some time to kill. One criticism - there was an excessive amount of ECG's in the cardiology section while there was probably only one of those on the entire shelf.

I also used Step Up to Medicine which is much more thorough and a must have for the shelf exam.

I have used this book multiple time and a must have for any medical student/resident. Helpful for 3rd year rotation exams, step 2 and step 3. Questions are the best way to prepare for step exams and boards and this book provides great questions and explinations of the answers to help fill in any gaps. Very high yield!!

It's pretty rare in my experience to ask a bunch of different people who did well on the shelf exam what they used and have them all say the same thing. This book is one of those cases. Of all the question books for all the various standardized tests I have taken at this stage of my medical education, this one has THE strongest correlation with the questions on the NBME IM shelf of anything. It's absolutely a must have for the IM Shelf exam, it's ridiculous honestly to use anything else. The questions are grouped into sections, but it comes with a CD where you can randomize stuff. The questions are a good level of difficulty, and correlate quite well with the difficulty of the exam. There are some questions on the shelf that this book may not cover, but those were quite few and far between. This is a book that you should do absolutely all of because every question is relevant. I think there were something like 3 questions on my shelf exam that were literally almost exactly the same as MKSAP which was great.

I think the best way to prepare for the IM shelf is this book with Step Up to Medicine +/- Case Files depending on your style. I did my medicine rotation first and I used Step up as a reference text, read case files on the train to the hospital/in various spare moments and read about all of my patients, and did all of the mksap questions, almost got through it a second time and did extremely well on the medicine shelf. I'm a crammer so I did this whole book like in the 1-2 wks before the exam which worked quite well for me. A lot of people swear by this book, I'm one of them, and it's for good reason.

Just a piece of advice for third years that a physician gave me at the beginning of the year that has brought me success on every shelf I've taken thus far; ask people who did well what they used to study and how they used the book and make a plan to attack these exams. A lot of my classmates don't do well on the shelf exams and I think it's because people don't go into it with a plan. You need a plan for every shelf. And don't stretch yourself too thin with too many resources either, you need to be able to cover every topic. You need ONE good question book/bank and 1 or 2 good written texts that are a manageable length. Good luck!

Takes a long time to do, so start early. But, that said, I'd go with something more parsed down, like Pre-test. Pair that with something more beefed up, like a few hundred of the 1400 Medicine q's on USMLE world, & you're better off than using this as your main resource. That said, from a standpoint of well written q's covering many topics of medicine at a fair level of difficulty for Jr year, this book is very good. Unfortunately, quality of resource doesn't always equate to shelf score.