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Now that enough time has passed for a resonable amount of people to have taken the first couple of COMAT shelfs respective of their discipline I decided to start this thread.
I recently took the IM COMAT shelf and here is my experience,
The test contained OMM, however I only had 1 direct question on OMM asking about innervations. 75% of the other questions on the test had OMM findings included in the question stem, sometimes they helped you arrive at the answer other times they could probably be overlooked.
There was a fair amount of linked questions, almost 25 or so of them at the end of the test, most of which were not too bad. There were a few linked questions where I was wondering exactly what they were asking and there could have been multiple correct answers.
There was an equal amount of cardio, neuro, renal material, minimal GI, and minimal heme onc. I was surprised to see a fair amount ( maybe 8-15) questions on step 1 style pharm questions ( ie mechanism of function, or clinical indication, or bugs+drugs, or side effects).
All in all I think it was similar in format to the questions on the 15 question practice test represented on the NBOME website, however the questions stems for the most part were longer. Some questions had very long stems similar to MKSAP or UW, others had 2 lines of information and you were left guessing exactly what it was that they were asking.
Currently as I understand it they dont have scaling available for these shelfs yet, so scores will be released as raw scores until they have enough data to scale it.
Overall it was doable, but rough in the sense that many of the questions were worded in such a way that the question itself remained as ambiguous as the answers.
Had a couple of other students from my class give feedback of the psych shelf, said it contained a fair amount of OMM and drugs, and the FP shelf, which was all over the place, and felt that blueprints and casefiles /uworld were not sufficient.
I recently took the IM COMAT shelf and here is my experience,
The test contained OMM, however I only had 1 direct question on OMM asking about innervations. 75% of the other questions on the test had OMM findings included in the question stem, sometimes they helped you arrive at the answer other times they could probably be overlooked.
There was a fair amount of linked questions, almost 25 or so of them at the end of the test, most of which were not too bad. There were a few linked questions where I was wondering exactly what they were asking and there could have been multiple correct answers.
There was an equal amount of cardio, neuro, renal material, minimal GI, and minimal heme onc. I was surprised to see a fair amount ( maybe 8-15) questions on step 1 style pharm questions ( ie mechanism of function, or clinical indication, or bugs+drugs, or side effects).
All in all I think it was similar in format to the questions on the 15 question practice test represented on the NBOME website, however the questions stems for the most part were longer. Some questions had very long stems similar to MKSAP or UW, others had 2 lines of information and you were left guessing exactly what it was that they were asking.
Currently as I understand it they dont have scaling available for these shelfs yet, so scores will be released as raw scores until they have enough data to scale it.
Overall it was doable, but rough in the sense that many of the questions were worded in such a way that the question itself remained as ambiguous as the answers.
Had a couple of other students from my class give feedback of the psych shelf, said it contained a fair amount of OMM and drugs, and the FP shelf, which was all over the place, and felt that blueprints and casefiles /uworld were not sufficient.