The USMLE was an incredibly poorly written test. I can't actually give any details here, but many of the questions were incredibly stupid. A few of the questions were not merely easy, but did not actually require any medical knowledge whatsoever. Others were impossible no matter what you knew. Meanwhile the diagrams that were actually produced by the Board -instead of swiped from somebody else's book- looked like they were drawn by Middle schoolers on graphing calculators. Can't they hire a real illustrator? Or if they can't, just swipe it like the rest of their pictures. Ugh. When people told me that the USMLE doesn't test how good a doctor I would be, I had no idea how true it was. Not only don't they test clinical skills, they don't even competently test basic sciences. No wonder kaplan doesn't try to get real test questions. If they gave out questions like these, people would demand their money back. I blame this on the fact that the people who make the test have a guaranteed monopoly and are completely unaccountable. After all, writing good test questions is very hard and if everyone has to accept your test anyway there's no reason not to publish any old thing and knock off early. I'm still mystified why unlike every other electronic test it takes 6 weeks to get your scores back. Grading on a curve doesn't make much sense since it takes 6 weeks no matter when you take the test. If anyone has any idea e-mail me.