The wait

Well, I took the exam on friday. It took just over seven hours to complete. The exam is administered in seven blocks of 48 questions which you have an hour to complete. There is 45 minutes of break time as well, that can increase if you finish a block early, as I am prone to do. My strategy was to do four blocks, take lunch, do two, break, and finish the last block. By the end of my fourth block, I was pretty tired and my brain was starting to feel fuzzy. Block 6 was really difficult, either because my brain was foggy or because it truly was tough. There were many times when I could narrow it down to two answers, and would just have to take a semi-educated guess. The difficult thing about Step 1 of the USMLE is that there are 336 questions, but not all 336 are graded. The exam draws from a random assortment of questions from a huge question bank. In order to deem a question worthy of being included, it must be presented as a trial question for several years, which means it is included in the exam, but not scored lest it be an unfair question. Consequently, I could kill myself for several minutes on an insanely hard question that may not actually be part of my grade. The challenge lies in not knowing how many and which of my questions are not "real" questions.

I really don't have a very good feel for how I did. During practice exams I could usually tell how I did based on the inverse of my emotions. If I finished a practice block feeling good, then the score was usually lower than if I finished feeling apprehensive. All of the questions are blended together in my head though, and I really don't have a good feel for how I did. I would really like to do as well as my practice scores at the end of my studying, but I'm not too sanguine about that. Again, I don't know if that's realism or if I'm just psyching myself out in case I don't do as well as I would like. Here's a graph of my progress that I made using my practice scores.
As you can see, there is generally an upward trend, at least if you look at the lowest scores. Overall I improved significantly from my beginning scores, but who knows if that bears out in the real thing. I'll post in July when I finally find out my score, and that will settle things once and for all.