It's done

Almost exactly two months to the day of my first Step 1 nightmare, I'm done with this stupid test. I wish I had some uplifting story about my journey towards enlightenment, but currently I feel like crap.

The good news is that I'm pretty sure I passed. The not-so-good news is I'm not sure by how much. And for ortho, I need to pass by mucho.

I'm mostly beating myself up for getting the gimme questions wrong. Some were so blatantly easy yet I still managed to mess them up. And there were also three questions on one concept that I just couldn't remember the answer to even though it was super straight-forward. By the time I got the third nearly identical question in my second-to-last block, I seriously said out loud, "Are you kidding me?!" It was so frustrating knowing exactly where I could find the answer to certain questions without knowing the damn answer.*

I've been trying to put it all out of my mind since there's nothing I can do until my score comes out in July. But the way the last few days have been going, I don't know how I'll make it until then. Instead of pre-step nightmares, I'm having flashbacks of questions I missed that I should've gotten right and easy questions my mind makes up just to mess with me. It's been a rough few days to say the least.

On the other hand, I've always been a good test-taker and in the last few days of studying when I totally stopped giving any shits, my practice scores went up 10%. Who knows? Maybe I'll be very pleasantly surprised like I was with the MCAT where after nearly voiding the score, I scored well above my practice test averages.

One can only hope.

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* I'd brought a review book with me to the testing center as a sort of security blanket if I needed it. After getting the first question on this concept, I figured there's no need to look it up because they probably won't ask the same thing twice. Then I got it a second time. And again, I didn't look it up because what are the chances it'll come up yet again. Well, it did. Clearly my strategy was flawed.