Vacation study strategies! Over the years, winter break has been one of the most popular times for students to start consistently practicing a daily routine of doing questions. Sticking to a regular review routine during the vacation helps you refresh on materials you've learned this past semester, and/or older content you learned last year. These healthy study habits will carry into the New Year, helping you to cruise right into your coursework, and for second- or third-year medical students, into boards with confidence in your comprehension.

As stated in this USMLE announcement, the recommended Step 1 minimum passing score will change from 192 to 194. This change will affect examinees who take a Step 1 examination that begins on or after January 1, 2018.

Through tomorrow night you can subscribe to Firecracker MD or Firecracker DO for $180 for 1 year, $300 for 2 years, or $400 for 4 years. This includes, well, everything:

This Friday we released two new PDF books to members: SketchyMicro and Pathoma companions. Like our other textbooks, these are complete renderings of Firecracker’s SketchyMicro and Pathoma topic coverage, complete with images, tables and charts. Each chapter links back to the relevant topic inside Firecracker so that you can kick off a flash card or test-question session directly.

The following is a guest-authored blog post from John, a second-year medical student at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, one of Firecracker's more than twenty official partner institutions:

We recently added three additional topics to the Family Medicine Clerkship product:

Wouldn't it be cool if, after the completion of your daily flashcards, you were able to re-do specifics cards again without having to work through the entire task a second time? For example if you wanted to just focus on the cards you rated a 1 or 2, or re-review flashcards from Urgent topics regardless of rating. Well, now you can!

With a lot of dedication and the help of Firecracker, a member at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston recently scored a 263 on their USMLE Step 1 exam. The student began using Firecracker as a primary source of flashcard and Q bank-style question review during the beginning of their second year of medical school, and attribute their great score to the detail-oriented nature of Firecracker's content. During their first year, they began their studying by creating personal flashcards from materials found in First Aid and other study resources, but once they stumbled upon Firecracker, they dedicated most of their board preparation to the platform. Check out how this user went about their board preparation:

As you likely know, each day Firecracker assigns you a single Daily Patient Case from our Q-bank which we think you have a 50% chance of answering correctly based on your past progress and performance. The goal of these cases is simple: get you comfortable answering board-style questions as early into your medical education as possible. Well today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve launched a big update: you can now do as many of these cases as you’d like each day via our new Daily Patient Case ‘Get Ahead’ task!

Until today, in Study Something Specific, you could review your progress and performance across each of the testable subject areas for your board exams. Some of the stats we showed were the number and percentage of topics you’ve marked, flashcards you’ve reviewed, and clinical vignettes you’ve answered. Today, though, we’re excited to announce the launch an update to Study Something Specific. Now, not only will you be able to see even more progress stats, including the amount of content which is at risk of being forgotten from each of your content modules, but you’ll also find it much easier to navigate and drill into specific modules.