HOW TO PREPARE FOR COMLEX LEVEL 3 (personal experience and recs)

Hey, what's going on guys? Welcome back to the channel. I just started my second year of emergency medicine residency. So, I'm super excited about that. But today, I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about Complex Level 3 and what to expect, how to study for it, and some questions that I think you should be prepared for going into that exam. And I was looking on YouTube for like resources for myself to kind of figure out what to expect from Complex Level 3. And there really isn't a lot of information about it out there. So, I think this video will be uh very helpful for anybody studying for complex level 3. And I want to thank Truelearn for sponsoring this video, but more on them a little bit later on. So, just a quick hot take on complex level 3. It is nothing like complex level one or level two or even step one or step two. It is a much easier and straightforward exam that requires a lot less studying. Even for those of you that aren't great test takers, you really aren't going to need to study nearly as much because most of what you're going to see on the exam, you have already seen in previous exams or you've learned by working in the hospital. And honestly, there isn't much utility to complex level 3. It's just another way for the MBME to make more money off of us. But yeah, let's get into what to kind of expect from this exam and how I personally studied and how I kind of recommend you guys go about studying for the exam. So, first, the exam is 2 days. So, they aren't backtoback. You schedule specific days. So, for me, I had about 4 days in between my two test dates. Um, which I really recommend. Um, you're going to be pretty exhausted after that first day. you know, they give you 8 hours to take each exam, but really you're not going to need that amount of time. The majority of you are going to finish in about 6 to 6 and 1/2 hours. Um, and obviously that depends on how many breaks you're taking. So, you get an hour worth of breaks for each day. And you can essentially split that up however you want. And each day there's four sections of the exam. And I can't quite remember how many questions are in each section, but I think it's like 70 to 80 questions per section. And like I said, there's four of those to complete your entire testing day. And honestly, for me, I was feeling pretty good during the test. So, I completely skipped that first break. So, I went from section one right into section two and then just took like a 30 minute lunch. And then on one of the days, I think I took a break between sections three and four. But this exam isn't super mentally taxing. So I don't know if you guys necessarily need to take breaks unless you are just exhausted and need to reset yourself or you're having a headache or something like that. So that's a little bit about testing day. You guys are familiar with have already taken complex one and two and you've probably taken step one and two. And just a quick side note, if you're a DO, which you most likely are since you're watching this video, you do not need to take step three. Unless you are trying to go into maybe a more competitive fellowship, then I would maybe talk to people in that fellowship and see if they took step three. But as far as everyone else, you only need to take complex level three. So about kind of the questions I had on my exam, and granted, all of the exams are very different. So this may not really apply to anyone except myself. There were some key concepts that I think would be good to have a you know decent understanding of that, you know, I wasn't super familiar with and I would say one of them is tuberculosis and kind of the treatments kind of the prophylactic treatments for exposure. um just essentially everything about tuberculosis would be good to know going into your exam. I would say another key concept to understand is HIV which shows up on most of our board exams. Um just a quick refresher on like the CD4 counts, which antibiotics you use, um you know, know like the prep therapy for exposure and prophylaxis. I got a lot of practice questions about stuff like that. And I'm not saying I got any questions on my exam, but I think that you most likely will see some questions like that on an exam. So, it will be worth your while to kind of do a quick refresh of those topics. The other thing I really noticed about complex level 3 are all of like the preventative medicine questions that I got both on practice questions and on my exam. Um it's a lot of primary care. So it's stuff that not many of us are super familiar with. So knowing like ages and what um vaccines you need at

those ages. For example, like the HPV vaccine, kind of knowing the ins and outs of like if you're sexually active, when you should get it, if you're not it. Um it's a lot of just primary care topics. Um so there's a lot of them out there. Um, so I would encourage you guys to try and do your best to study up on those primary care topics as well. Another topic that I saw a lot on practice questions, but I didn't actually get a question on my exam was the New York heart failure classification scale. So just kind of knowing it's like one through four. Um, just kind of knowing who is put into each one of those classifications. Now, you may be worried about, you know, getting topics that you weren't comfortable with on your complex level one and level two. And I will say that overall, complex level 3 is a very broad exam. They're not going to ask you the tiny details that you were asked on your complex level one. They may bring up like vascularities, but you're not going to have to differentiate between all of the different vascularities. It's going to be very broad. It should be very straightforward and very easy to answer. I really wouldn't recommend like studying fine details of all of these diseases. And once you guys start doing practice questions and studying, True Learn does a really good job at showing you the amount of detail that you need to go into when preparing for your exam. So, as you guys know, Complex Level 3, it's two days. half of one of the days, usually your second day, and just half of that day, is going to be those case-based questions. So, you're going to get kind of like a question stem and then you're going to answer like three or four questions about that stem. And if you guys haven't seen an example of those, True also has a bunch of examples and practice questions going over how to best answer those questions. So, definitely check those out on Truelearn. These questions are pretty easy. Um, all they want to do is see your train of thought and your medical decisionmaking. I will say they want you to be a little bit more detailed. So, the more detailed you can be in your answers and if you didn't know, these are open-ended questions. So, you actually have to type out your answer. There's no multiple choice on these questions. So, it all has to come from up here. But, if say they're asking you a question about antibiotics, you can't just put, oh, I give the patient antibiotics. You got to specify which antibiotic and it should be pretty straightforward. It's not going to be some weird antibiotic you've never heard of. It's going to be something easy like Kelex or amoxicylin. They may be asking you about community acquired pneumonia. So that should be a very straightforward question and answer. Um so those antibiotics you really should know as well as questions about like urinary tract infections. So common pathologies that we should all essentially know how to treat. Um, and so just know those antibiotics for those types of pathologies. I'm not saying those are the ones that you'll see on your exam, but they're going to be very similar. It's going to be a very common thing that people treat almost daily. But like I said, just do practice questions on TrueLearn. You will get the hang of it. It's not hard at all. They're actually a lot easier than the multiple choice questions in my opinion. I didn't feel too bad after doing that section of the exam. Um, there were a couple questions that were pretty vague, so I didn't quite know what they were looking for, but for the majority of the questions, it was very straightforward. You knew exactly what they wanted you to put down. Um, so I really wouldn't stress too much about those either. So, let's talk about how to really like go about studying for this exam because it's very different from the previous board exams that you guys have taken. And you really don't need very many resources. is I would say the majority of people are using a question bank and obviously if you're a DO then you're going to want to use Truelearn. I've used Trlearn for all of my complex exams because they do a great job at asking appropriate osteopathic questions but I would say for Comlex level three they are really good at preparing you not only for the OMM section of Comlex but also for the medicine portion of Comlex. So, if you guys are kind of on the fence of like what resources to use, just use Truelearn and you will be prepared for your exam. I wouldn't mess around with doing multiple question banks or getting other study materials. You really just need to do practice questions and honestly just stick with Truelearn one question bank. They do a great job at explaining what the question is asking and how they want you to answer it. So, at the end of every question, there's a great explanation on what that question was specifically asking and why the answer is correct. The other nice thing about TrueLearn is for a lot of like their OM

questions, they actually have videos showing you how to position the patient or how to actually do the treatment. In my complex exam, there were a decent amount of videos that showed how a patient was positioned for an OM technique and then I had to answer a question based on that video. So, TrueLearn is great about preparing you for those types of questions as well. And as you guys know, I've made videos about True in the past because I truly think that it's a good resource for OM and for DOU students and residents. And there's a very specific thing that I like about their platform and it's that you can actually search for specific questions. So if you just want to do questions on like counter strain for OM you can literally just type in counter strain and a list of questions will show up and you just click them all and create an exam and then you can just focus on counter strain. You can do that for any topic. You can do Chapman's points. You can do tuberculosis questions, HIV questions, um, literally anything. You just type it into their search bar and you can just create a very focused exam on those specific topics. So, at the end of the day, complex level three is a very broad exam that you really don't need to focus or dedicate a ton of time to studying and learning topics because for the most part, you guys already know the topics that will show up on complex level three. You may just need to do practice questions to kind of remind yourself of those topics. like I remember doing my practice questions and in the moment I'm like I know I've seen this question before or I know what they're trying to ask me but I just cannot remember the answer and as soon as you see the answer you're like oh my gosh how did I not remember that because you've already studied most of this on your previous board exams so it's more than anything just refreshing your brain of all of these topics so just doing kind of a decent amount of practice questions will kind of jumpst start your brain. You'll start seeing, you know, those familiar topics again and then you'll be prepared for your exam. Like I said, they're not going to ask you a lot of tiny details in the exam, but True Learn is really going to prepare you guys well for your exam. They're and you'll realize the amount of detail that you'll need to know for your exam by doing the practice questions. I didn't even finish the TrueLearn question bank. I did about,00 questions and they have over 2,000 practice questions. And after doing a little bit of research, it seems like only about 4% of people actually fail the exam. So, just don't be in the bottom 4% essentially. Anyways guys, I hope this video was helpful. If you're interested in getting True Learn, there will be a discount link down in the description. Feel free to use that, save some money, and if you guys have any additional questions, drop them down in the comments. Be happy to answer those for you. But, uh, hope you guys have a good day at work. I'm about to head into the ER, so I will catch you guys another