How many Qbank questions per day should I do?

How do I figure out my daily number?

Work backward from your exam date. You need four numbers:

1. Questions left in the bank, or your goal if you're not finishing it.
2. Your finish date. Give yourself a few days of buffer before the exam.
3. Rest days. Be honest. Plan them now so you don't take them out of guilt later.
4. Practice exam days. Each one costs more than a day. After every full-length, I needed time to recover and review before regular questions made sense again.

Divide questions left by real study days. That's your daily target. Then convert it to blocks of 40 so it's something you can schedule. The calculator below does the math, including rest days.

How many questions per day for Step 1/Level 1 dedicated?

There's no universal number. Mine was about 180 a day, in practice mode, reading every explanation. I'm sharing it as a real data point, not a target.

What made it possible:

• I wasn't starting cold. I'd been doing UWorld through the last weeks of classes, so I knew how long a block took me.
• Most questions happened in my sharpest hours. Two to three blocks of 40 in the morning, then other work. See how to use UWorld.
• Practice exams were spaced out. Taking one every three days was my limit.

If your number comes out much higher than you can sustain, the answer is usually to start earlier or plan a different finish, not to cut sleep.

How many questions per day on a rotation?

Think in terms of finishing the subject, not hitting a daily count. For internal medicine and family medicine, the question sets are big, and it's tempting to do only a portion. I pushed myself to finish all of them during the rotation. It made my first internal medicine rotation much harder, and it paid off by the end of the year.

So the math is the same: questions left in your subject, divided by study days left before the shelf. Clinical days will steal some of those study days, so be conservative. More in shelf exams.

How do practice exams fit into the count?

Schedule them first, then fill the rest with questions. For Step 2/Level 2, I took about 10 practice exams over a 26-day dedicated period. I read which self-assessments other students considered most useful, then worked backward and put the ones I trusted most, like the Free 120, closest to exam day.

Before I built that calendar, I was overwhelmed and had no idea where to start. Once the practice exams were placed, the daily question target fell out of the days that were left. See the Step 1 dedicated schedule for how that looks in practice.

Does the number matter more than the quality?

Both matter, at different times. In the classroom years I'd choose quality over volume. In third year and dedicated, you need volume to get through the material, and you have to push through some lower-quality sessions to do it.

The 5 Study Modes are how I kept both. High-quality sessions went first in the day. High-volume sessions, often in a different bank, went last.

What if I fall behind?

You probably will at some point. Re-run the numbers rather than trying to make it up in one day. Push the finish date if you can, drop a low-value resource, or trim a practice exam that won't tell you anything new. Then pick the new daily target and keep going.