All Medical Students must take board exams in order to practice in the United States. Because of this it is no secret that medical students must be well prepared to take these examinations. But with so mamny different board preparation materials which is the best? One product is the Boardvitals question bank, and it is quickly growing ni popularity. But is the BoardVitals question bank worth investing in for board prep? In this article I will be doing an objective review on the boardvitals question bank

BoardVitals Question Bank Price

Individual pricing options will vary based on which exam you choose. So for Example, For Medical Students taking the USMLE step 1, Step 2, or Step 3, Pricing options can be seen below:

Who is the BoardVitals Question bank For

BoardVitals Question Bank are popular among medical students preparing for Board Examinations as well as Shelf Examinations in the third year of medical school. The BoadVitals Question Bank Covers a large number of medical specialities, Nursing Exams which includes NCLEX RN as well as NCLEX PN. The exams for dentistry contain NBDHE, and INB.

Features

• Quizzes can be created with questions that have either been seen, answered or unanswered.
• Quizzes are created based on organ system. 

• In depth answer explanations which includes pictures and diagrams
• Quizzes can be made either with a timer to simulate actually the actual testing environment

Answer Explanations

One of the good features about the boardvitsals question bank is the fact that they provide you with an explanation for why some answers are wrong. Many question banks will only give you an explanation as to why the correct answer is what it is. 

Question Difficulty

This is one of the few question banks where after getting a question wrong you are not left wondering how the question even makes  sense, or the classic “that question is just way out of my league, there is no way that I would ever ever have a chance of getting it right. In general the questions are difficult enough that you are being challenged but not so difficult that you are just confused and demoralized.

Because the questions are the perfect level of difficulty I reccommend not using this resource not so early on because you don’t want to waste them. 

Additionally BoardVitals allows you to see which questions are categorized as difficult or easy. THis helps you to better guage your ability to correctly answer the more difficult questions that you are likely to encounter on. I give more of an insight into the question bank in the following video below:

Interface

• Overall I would say the interface is very user friendly. The homepage shows your percentage correct for all of the questions that you have taken in a particular question bank
• Additionally the question bank is very organized. If you purchased more than one question bank product all of your products are accessible by clicking on the scroll down at the top of the page which says Question Bank. This will show you all of your question bank
• The Dashboard also displays the number of questions that you have answered, the number of questions that are unseen as well as the number of questions that are unanswered. 
• Below your overall performance you can see your performance 

Other insights of the BoardVitals Question Bank

Some of the questions I noticed read like flashcards. For example some questions will be single sentence and just ask you a basic fact. There are a decent amount of these. I am not sure how common it is to have thse on the USMLE exam but I did notice that BoardVitals had a decent amount. 

Pros of the BoardVitals Question Bank

• The interface gives yout he ability to search up questions which you previously answered in a quiz session
• The dashboard keeps track of your progress for you
• There is a Quick Start Quiz options which allows you to generate a quiz which contains 10 unanswered quiz questions
• You are allowed to Suspend the question bank for up to 6 monts befor your subscription period begins. This is particularly useful if you purchase the question bank, but there is still a bit of time until your exam.

• The question types mirror the USMLE board exams well
• You have the ability to purchase a bundle which contains all of the shelf exams. This bundle has more than 5600 questions 

Cons of The BoardVitals Question Bank

• There is no ability to retake a quiz once you have submitted it
• Some of the questions are not multiple choice which is a bit frustrating considering this is not entirely representative of the USMLE format which contains ALL multiple choice questions
• The Dashboard does not show your percentile in comparison to the national average
• One of the biggest cons for the USMLE exam is the price of the question bank. A 6 month subscription costs almost 500 dollars
• No videos or tutorials. THe product strictly has questions and question explanations.
• If you purchase other question banks, Some of the questions overlap in between the question banks. For example, I noticed a lot of the questions in the step 2 bank were also in the Step 1 Question bank. You might want to consider buying the step 1 and step2 question bank far apart from each other (depending on when you plan on taking the exam) because some of the questions are repeated and to the get the most out of the product you don’t want to have any of the answers sor questions memorized because this will skew your score results.

When to use the BoardVitals Question Bank for Medical Students

I would say the best time to use the boardvitals question bank is closer to your USMLE board  exam. The other way that you could use the BoardVitals Question bank is to 

How to use the boardVitals Question bank in Medical School

There are many ways to the Boardvitals question bank. One thing way you could use it is as a mock exam for your boards. As previously mentioned, BoardVitals is one of the few question banks which has very similar questions as well as content to what you can expect to see on board exams.