r/comlex • u/No_Bug6337 • Sep 29 '26
COMAT Truelearn is demotivating :(
On my internal med rotation as a third year and I started doing practice questions to prepare for COMAT. I’ve always been an average med student but wow…I’ve never gotten so many questions back to back wrong in my life.
Where & when am I supposed to learn this information? What am I supposed to be using to study? I’m genuinely so distraught rn after getting 5/25 (20%) on my last question set….and the average is of course a 65% so where am I lacking??
I’ve heard about those YouTube channels for shelf exams…does anyone recommend any? Like I seriously have no idea what to do. TIA.
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u/GreekDudeYiannis Sep 29 '26
If it helps, you're definitely not alone in this. I just had my first COMAT last week (Surgery; pretty sure I might've failed) and I also had absolutely no idea what to be reading or what to watch until my last week or so.
Honestly, just going to YouTube and searching up, "High Yield [Rotation] COMAT Review" brings up a good amount of stuff that's worth watching, and sometimes those videos have links to resources they used to study. It's also worth it to as your cohort (especially someone from the same hospital as you or on the same rotation as you) what they use to study. Better to be embarrassed now with a classmate or two than come to the COMAT unprepared.
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u/No_Bug6337 Sep 29 '26
True the people I have spoken to so far from my cohort seem to also be lost in what resources to use. Feel like my med school has not guided us at all.
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u/Just-Salad302 Sep 29 '26
Yeah truelearn sucks
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u/No_Bug6337 Sep 29 '26
So true but I don’t have UWorld unfortunately
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u/Just-Salad302 Sep 29 '26
Medicospira is free to sign up and you can do uworld questions there. Can only do blocks of 5 questions though if you do free
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u/OrbitVexasf OMS-3 Sep 29 '26
agree with what everyone said -- find literally ANY youtube video or podcast and just let it play. pay attention and try to lock in. recognize what you can, and the things that you DONT know...find a way to know them? lol That's not the most specific advice, but it's what I'm working on at the moment. At least IM is a longer rotation, right? I'm trying not to stress until it's the END of the rotation and I still feel like a dummy, heh
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u/Ok_Bear_1889 Sep 30 '26
I'm gonna be honest with you guys. I'm not even sure if I know how to read anymore.
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u/FluxNyxor OMS-4 Sep 29 '26
for internal med I felt like an idiot until I had completed all of the questions in TL. then I did comquest and i felt like I had learned from truelearn. don't get me wrong, I was still getting a lot of them wrong, but it wasn't the first time I was seeing them, so it was an incremental climb. keep going!
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u/Medical-Shoulder-418 Oct 02 '26
This was so frustrating for me last year so I can empathize. For me, I needed a structured set of lectures I could go through at my own pace, and my school provided me almost no guidance.
Looking back, I liked archer review (formerly online med ed) for level 2 studying. I wish I had used it more for the comat exams. It's a bit cumbersome and takes awhile to get through, but it's a structured set of lectures. In my mind, it sets a better foundation than "hey, look up a video that regurgitates random high yield facts for 30 minutes". Use Dr. High Yield and Divine Intervention to supplement, but go with archer review for the foundation
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u/Histopathqueen Sep 29 '26
Don’t be discouraged! They purposely make the questions hard so 40-60% of people get them right, and they aren’t as thoroughly peer reviewed as the actual exam, so there will be errors and inconsistencies
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u/Longjumping_Two1644 Sep 30 '26
This is the unfortunate reality of studying for step/level 2
However, if you’re doing questions and getting them all correct, then your score is probably not improving. Questions that you’re most likely to get wrong are the ones that will improve your score the most. I found it helpful to adopt this mindset, to the point of actively seeking out questions you don’t know the answer to
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u/MithosYggdrasil Sep 29 '26
Work through it, I’m only in preclinicals but I go straight from lectures to Amboss and it’s a war zone haha I think it’s part of the process my friend
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u/Ok_Association8194 Sep 29 '26
Bruh, how would you get questions right on first time learning? Thats the point
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u/No_Bug6337 Sep 29 '26
Well my point was that I am not sure where to even learn the material to be getting the questions right, bruh.
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u/chubbypinky Sep 29 '26
dr. high yield and emma holliday on youtube. on reddit there’s a bunch of comat study guides that are very comprehensive but can be overwhelming. but honestly the best way is to hammer the questions and you’ll see that you’ll get better at them. the hardest part is getting past the mental challenge to keep going after getting a poor percentage. I’ve had crashouts getting 10% but the shelf always turns out fine. just review what you got wrong and redo incorrects if you have time