Quote:
Originally Posted by medschool22
does falcon have a sample ppt they distribute? I'd like to see how they lay everything out. We all know how kaplan lays things out, but I have never seen anything similar in terms of falcon (or pass).
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Regarding Layout: Powerpoint presentation is powerpoint pretty much everywhere: bulleted lists with occassional pictures and charts and graphs. Nothing super fancy. Your books are just printouts so you don't need to lug around a laptop. Just something to jog your memory.
Regarding content: Content quality is good. At first it seems to shallow just by looking at the powerpoint slides prior to lecture, but the lectures in class fill in the gaps, as it is intended that students attend every lecture and take short notes - only one or two lines per slide if that much. Kaplan by contrast is much more detailed. I had Kaplan books at my side when studying along with Falcon books, and if there was an occassional point I felt Falcon didn't cover in the depth I wanted (a rare occassion) looked it up in the much more dense Kaplan books. Used Kaplan like a reference only, like Netters Atlas or other text books. The only other book I used for quick reference (the night before the exam) was First Aid, mainly for their superior explaination of biostats and nice microbiology charts.
Bottom Line:
Falcon in my opinion was much more focused only on the test content,
nothing else. If you want to jump up like 15 to 30 points to maximize your USMLE or go from failing to a pass, do Falcon. If you must score a perfect score for the derm match memorize Kaplan, or better yet pay attention during med school and do USMLE World questions every day. I frankly just couldn't do that back then.
I don't work for falcon. I did get asked to speak for them last year, but I was too busy to consider it at the time.
A final thought: regarding these board exams, for most people less is more. You can spend all your time jumping from one book to another looking to piece together topics and go crazy, or you can be disciplined and stick with one good review source and only supplement it on rare occassion. Kaplan and Falcon are both excellent. I have no experience with PASS but have heard many positive things, hopefully someone else can let you know.
Email Falcon and PASS and ask for a sample page to be emailed to you. The results will at least tell you how much they value individual customers.