Hi, this is Tom and in this video I'm going to be taking you through my medical school finals strategy which ended up getting me honors when I graduated. So, in this video, what I'm going to do is talk about my strategy for my finals. I sat my finals in January 2014, so more than 10 years ago. It's been been quite a while. I'm going to talk about how I dealt with the limited resources that were available at the time. So, there was no zero to finals at that point. There weren't really many online question banks. It was quite limited what resources were available. I'll talk about how I did that and also how I would improve that strategy if I was going to do it today with the resources that are currently available. And I'll show you the zero to finals resources I've created specifically to help with medical school finals as we go through when it's relevant. So what is the problem with preparing for medical school finals? The issue is there's just so much to know. Um, there's a ridiculous amount of content that you need to know and there are endless resources and endless amounts of things that you can learn. So, you've got kind of the 20% of things that come up on the exam of all the things that you could know. Um, so you you can learn almost infinite amounts of content for medical school finals and the 20% um about 20% of what you study is what's going to make up 80% of what's on the exam. So a big challenge is trying to identify and figure out the key stuff that you really need to know because it's going to come up on the exam and uh that's how you do well in the exam. So there's always this difficulty of knowing what's relevant, what you need to know, what's the essential stuff and then what's kind of nice to know stuff that is the icing on the cake, but really identifying that core information. And then another issue is just the limited time that you have to learn it. So I think I started in August 2013 and then my finals were in January 2014. So I had sort of September, October, November, December and then maybe January. So about 4 months, 4 and 1/2 months to learn all the content I needed to know. squeezing that in around clinical placements, lectures, um portfolio stuff that you have to get signed off and all the other responsibilities you have uh for your final exams and in your final kind of semester of medical school. Um so it's really limited time and you can't waste time uh trying to build your own resources, create your own set of notes, learn everything and going off on tangents. Um, and so there's this real big challenge. The other thing is trying to cover the breadth of things rather than getting sidetracked and only learning key stuff and then having big gaps in your knowledge. You really want to have a wide uh breadth of knowledge for your medical school finals. There's no point being incredibly good at say cardiology but then having no knowledge of pediatrics and women's health and then when you're in your exam only like 20% of the exam is going to be on the medical stuff you're really good at and then you're not very good at the other 80% of the exam and you end up failing. So it's really key is getting the breadth and knowing what to know. So let's talk about my strategy and uh how I ended up graduating with honors after finals. So the first thing to talk about when in April 2023 so this was towards the end of my fourth year of medical school before going into final years I attended a finals revision course and at the time this was ask Dr. Clark uh medicine and surgery and I'd already covered I've already been to the ask Dr. Clark pediatrics and obs courses at this point. So I thought let me get ahead of the game attend a finals revision course that will give me a boost in my knowledge and the other thing that did was it gave me a course book. So this was like a a course book that contained some of the key topics that you needed to know for finals. And this course book formed the foundation of my notes, the foundation of what I needed to learn for finals. So it was a really good useful kind of starting point to know here's the content I need to know. So what I did with this course book is uh use that as the as the starting point and I'll talk about that in more detail shortly. I have a zero to finals finals revision course um which I started running in January and there's more courses coming up in sort of October, November, December time this year. So if you're looking for a finals revision course, highly recommend that one. And it's a full day where we cover all the key stuff, the really essential content for finals in a really interactive way. So you you are constantly testing yourself and using strategies that are proven to help you remember the information longer. And there's some repetition in there of the really key facts, so you really walk away knowing more stuff. And you also get a finals uh revision guide which is essentially like the course book I used but this is 160 pages with really concise notes covering everything you need to know. So you'll be able to see uh the idea is that it really is the essential stuff you need to know for finals covering everything and you get a set of flash cards 160 flash cards which you can use to uh test your knowledge uh rapidly. So if you're on the if you're commuting on the bus or the tube or whatever you're uh however you're getting to placements and so on, you can just keep testing yourself on on key facts. Um so let's move on to the next step after I did this course and got this uh sort of revision course book which is learning the res uh creating the kind of learning resources that I was going to use to prepare for finals. So you can't just uh you know pick up information from wherever it comes to you and hope that you know uh that information on the exam day. you need a kind of external database or a set of learning resources that you keep coming back to, revising from and and transferring that from the from the resource into your memory and storing it there. So, I use the ask Dr. Clark book as my foundation set of notes. And I'll kind of show you here what that looked like, but I separated the Ask Dr. Clark book into topics. So it' be cardiology, endocrinology, gastro, then there'd be sort of like pediatrics, gynecology, and so on. All these different topics that I needed for finals and put it into a folder where it was separated into those topics. And then that was the kind of starting point, the foundation. I started learning that straight away. But then as I was going through my clinical placements, revision sessions, uh you know, revision teaching sessions, other sessions where information would come up that I realized I didn't know, I would scribble those notes into the Ask Dr. Clark book. And that way I was kind of expanding uh where I saw gaps in those notes, expanding the content of the books. So, be able to see um it's just uh the basic notes plus my my additional notes, but really a limited amount of information in there. And then if I had if I found there were big topics missing, for example, it didn't cover uh like ethics or statistics or other topics, I would find uh notes online and download and print those off and add those into my folder, which was my external database that I needed to learn from. Um then the next step is I needed some multiplechoice questions and the purpose of the multiple choice questions is to test myself um in a similar way to how I was going to be tested in the exams. So medical school finals involves usually multiple choice questions and so I needed some practice multiple choice questions to practice for the exam and applying that knowledge that I'd gained from going through the book. So what I used was a book which is quite old now from 2009 called Crash Course Self Assessment in Medicine and Surgery. I wouldn't recommend this book because it's it's quite outdated now and it's quite limited actually. There's only sort of 20 maybe 30 questions, multiple choice questions per topic. So if you go through cardiology, there's only 20 or 30 questions on that. But at the time there wasn't really online question banks. This was the best resource I could find for just some practice multiple choice questions. Since then, I've built the Zero to Finals member site which contains multiple choice questions and these are very specifically designed to complement the Zero to Finals resources and test your knowledge beyond just pattern recognition. A lot of question banks have like 300 questions on cardiology and they're all just pattern recognition. You just spot keywords and then you know the answer. the the zero to finals multiple choice questions are designed to give you a full story. They're very detailed and so you have to interpret a lot of information and put your knowledge into practice in a clinical scenario and uh answer the question that way. So they test you a bit more uh a bit closer to how your exams are going to test you. So with the zero to finals multiplechoice questions, you select the topic um that you'll see there's not too many questions. So you can go through all these questions in one sitting and then do multiple uh attempts at the questions. Um so you really train your knowledge and then they're highly detailed. It's not pattern recognition. You choose the answer to the question. uh check the answer and then it gives you an exclamation explanation. It gives you a link to the uh more information which is the zero to finals notes on that topic and there's a link to the video from zero to finals if um if you want to learn more and then at the end of doing the questions it records your score. The next thing I needed for my final exams to complete my external database. So, we've already got the notes, we've got the multiple choice questions, and now I needed some short answer questions. And for my medical school finals, I couldn't find any short answer question resources. So, what I did was write my own short answer questions. And so, what I would do is have a document, create all the questions on one side of the document or one page, and then on another page, there were the answers. And with each question there was a number of key points that you needed to pick up. So you see the number after the question and then uh you can test yourself. Write down all the answers that you can think of. Then check the answers and give yourself a score. So I would score myself this way on these short answer questions and then I would know how much I I knew about all these um all these topics. So I've kind of improved upon this with the zero to final short answer questions. So again you select your topics then you start learning you have the question you write down your answer or you think of your answer to that question then you can check the answer and check off the boxes to say which answers you got correct and then you can keep going and do more and more questions. at the end it will give you a score so you know how well you've scored on that topic. Okay, on to the third part. So, so far we've done the revision course then we've got together the external database. The third part was to create a tracking table and the way I did this was literally on a piece of paper by hand I created a table. So I um I uh used a ruler literally drew out a table. Then along the left hand side in the column was the topics. So this would be cardiology, endocrinology, gastroenterology and so on. Then each column going across was attempt one, attempt two, attempt three, attempt four. So these were repetitions of that topic. And in these boxes, so say I did a a study session on cardiology, I would record. So this would be the first one. I would record the date. So say today's date. Then I would record the short answer question score and then I would record the multiplechoice question score. And so what I would do is go through all the topics. So cardio, I would do a study session on that. Record my scores. end a crime study session on that record the scores and so on and over time so that I do all the first first attempts first then I would move on to the second attempt so this is the second repetition going through the same topic using those resources that I've already created and I'd be aiming for three or five repetitions of each topic over that four months leading up to finals. So I've you can by all means create a tracking table just like this or you can use the tracking tool on the zero to finals member site which I built specifically for this purpose. So what you do is you create an exam say your finals and you put in the date say that's in 3 months time. Then you add the topics that are relevant and you can add custom topics if you want to. Then you record a study session on the topic that you're doing that day. You rate your confidence on that study session and it then you submit it and it records your test scores for you. So it will show you how you're scoring on the multiple choice questions, short answer questions and so on. And as you study more, you record more and more of these study sessions. they get recorded in the tool and the tool will adjust the order of the topics so that the top priority topic floats to the top. So, this is the topic you're least confident on and has been uh the longest time since you last studied it, meaning that you need to do another repetition of that topic. And then at the top it shows you how long till your exam and it gives you a progress bar which shows your progress towards being ready for the exam. So now we've got the tracking table, we've got our resources, the next step is to start learning. So what does a revision session look like? Well, if you've been following the channel for a while, you'll know it's based on this thing called the testing sandwich. And this is what I use for my finals. In fact, this what I use back dating back to uh A levels with really good results. And this involves starting you sit down for one study session. So, you're going to sit there until you finish this study session. The thing you start with is short answer questions. So, this is uh testing yourself with those short answer questions all the way through all the short answer questions on that topic. Give yourself a score and record that in your tracking table. The useful thing about this with the short answer questions is it primes your brain to start absorbing information and it tells you how much you remember on that topic before you even start revising it. So when you first do the topic, your short answer question score might be like 10%. Because uh you're not very good at that topic yet. But then when you're on repetition three or four, your short answer score might be 70 or 90%. So you know you're much better. The second thing you do in the testing sandwich is read and recall. And I've got a whole video about how to do read and recall in the video description below. So I'm not going to go through that now. But essentially this is very very active uh reading where you're constantly trying to recall information because recalling is how you store that information much more than just passively reading it. Then the third part of the testing sandwich is doing multiple choice questions. And this is practicing specifically what you're going to be doing in your exam and applying the information that you just did with read and recall. and then again note down your score. So the principles when you're learning are to cover all the topics once. So you do a study session on each topic one time. So I'd do about one or two study sessions per day when I was preparing for finals. And obviously there were days where I was too busy to do one and there were days where I could do maybe even three study sessions. And so you cover every topic at for that first repetition as quick as possible. And then the second repetition, you look at your tracking table and you see what topic you're weakest at. And that's the one you start with for your second repetition. And so uh then you do your second repetitions. Then you move on to the third repetitions and you start with the weakest topic again. And some topics you might only cover once because you're already really strong at it. And you and the weakest topics you might cover five times because you're really weak at them and it takes you that many times to really get strong. And so um this way you're really addressing your weaknesses. You're you're covering the full breadth of the curriculum and making sure you don't miss any key information. Then the third uh the fifth point here is two weeks before your exam. At this point, you should have covered everything with several repetitions on the weakest topics and feeling fairly confident. At this point, I implemented rapid testing. So, so about 2 weeks before the exam, I stopped this kind of testing sandwich technique and I just did rapid testing. And this is really to just cram the key facts into your memory and identify any really weak areas where you just want to address those with a little bit of extra reading, very focused reading on particularly weak areas. So what I did was just using the short answer questions. So, I'd go through all my short answer questions for all the topics, pick out from doing short answer questions areas where I felt really weak and just quickly address those, but mostly I was just rapidly testing myself to drill key facts in. Nowadays, you could just use Anki or rather than creating your own Anki, which is going to take a lot of time, you could um use the zero to finals fact trainer tool. This is what this was specifically built for is drilling the key facts with multiple repetitions which are spaced out. So with the fact trainer tool, you select the topics you want to study. Then you have a question, you think of the answer, and then you check the answer. Then you rate that question whether it's easy, in which case it will show you the question again in a week, whether it's medium, which will show you the question again in 3 days, or hard, which will show you the question again immediately. Um, or you can rate it never, never review, which means you don't see that question again if it's really easy. So this using this fact trainer tool uh you can keep rapidly testing yourself and it will space out the facts um depending on how difficult you find them. So you repeat the more difficult facts much more often. And then the final thing is one to two days before your exam. I would just recommend chilling, relaxing and getting lots of sleep and rest. This way when you sit your exam on the exam day you're uh as rested and fresh as possible. So every time before couple days before my exam I wouldn't be trying to cram things in. I wouldn't be stressing my brain too much. I would be really really fresh. And the way you can think of this is like let's say you're an Olympic athlete and you're going to do a 100 meter sprint. You're not going to be doing a heavy weight session, a heavy sprinting session the day before your 100 m sprint. You're going to be resting so your muscles are full of energy, full of glycogen, and ready to perform at your best on the day. And then on the day, you might do some kind of light warm up stuff. Um, a little bit of testing yourself, not really stressing yourself, not getting anxious about it. just a little warm up to um to get you ready for the exam, but you're not going to be pushing yourself hard in the day or two before the exam. You want to rest at this point. I hope that uh video was helpful. You can find links to everything that I talked about uh in the video description. If you want a nice set of these notes so you can refer back to this strategy really quickly um without having to watch this whole video again, you can download these notes uh on the Zero tofinals Patreon which also gives you access to the member site. Uh so it's all just one one membership uh to the Zero to Finals Patreon. You'll get these notes which you can download and then you'll get access to the the member site as well. I hope that video was helpful and I'll see you in the next video which will be in about a week's time.