Histology

Recipes for Success 

• Pre-recorded Lectures - it is very important that you watch the pre-recorded lectures (Voice Threads) before class. Labs are a wonderful opportunity to practice and review what you learned from the pre-recorded lectures and being familiar with the material will allow you to make the most of this time. You can unsuspend corresponding Anking/Lightyear cards by searching for keywords while watching, but most concepts won’t be in the decks, and you’ll need to make your own cards. Remember you can speed up the videos.   

• Lab - if you have time, it can be helpful to familiarize yourself with virtual lab slides and questions. Do your best to read the assigned material in the lab manual before coming to the lab session. This is not essential but it will reinforce the content from the pre-recorded lectures. Lab will be challenging at first but you will be surprised by how much you will learn from the lab sessions. Be patient with yourself and focus on understanding the concepts rather than recognizing specific images.

• Team Presentation - these should not be stressful! Rather than in-person presentations, we created VoiceThread presentations in which each group created a review for a different topic in the course. These ended up being great class study tools for the final exam! Make a plan with your team about who is going to cover which topics and make sure that you determine which slides you want to record/present to the class. Each person only needs to record ~1 minute of the presentation, so it should be easy and straightforward. 

• Optional Quizzes - the optional quizzes are incredibly helpful for gauging your learning. They also are very similar to the midterm in terms of question format and level of difficulty, so it is recommended that you do them all (even if you don't feel like you "know everything" yet) and ask clarifying questions.

• Midterm Exam - Our midterm was 100% in-house questions on Brightspace. The optional quizzes above, optional review by AZ TA, and weekly reviews by MN TA’s are good practice material. Try your ABSOLUTE BEST on the midterm because scoring a point here is 3x easier than scoring a point on the final. There is significantly less material on the midterm vs. the final, and the content itself is significantly easier. So aim for the maximum points here, to have a much easier time on the final. 

• Final Exam - Our 100% NBME final was cumulative and consisted of 54% pre-midterm content, and only 46% post-midterm content. This again underscores the importance of mastering the first half of the class, since you can technically pass with only mastery of pre-midterm content. The post-midterm content is much heavier, and our class created a tier list based on the question distributions to prioritize studying certain organ systems (and completely ignoring a few). The question distributions will likely differ, but consider creating a similar tier-list to guide your studying since there are many difficult units that are low-yield and have little weight on the final. There was NO curve for our class. This will be the first of many NBME exams that you will take throughout medical school. NBME exams are national exams and thus do not perfectly reflect what you learned in class. They are often difficult and you may feel discouraged after taking them. That is okay! These are meant to challenge you and you will probably end up doing better than you expect. Again, take this as an opportunity to become familiar with this style of test. The grading at the end is curved to adjust for the difficulty of these exams.

Best Resources

There are not many resources listed here because histology is not a “high yield” subject for STEP 1. That doesn’t mean that what you learn is unimportant, but it does mean that you can learn this block without having to rely upon as many outside resources. Focus on building strong study habits in this course rather than attempting to figure out all of the outside resources.

• Boards and Beyond

  • Video Schedule for BnB and Pixorize Videos that correspond with each unit. For the first half of the course, the BnB+Pixorize will cover 90% of the content you need to know outside of image recognition. Do these third party videos first, then fill in the remaining 10% with voicethreads and the lab manual. Then, practice image recognition with turning point/optional quizzes/MN TA reviews/bootcamp. 

• Minnesota Weekly Reviews

  • Our year, the MN Histology TA’s did weekly reviews that focused on just the high-yield facts and great practice questions. Hint: the starred slides may appear on the midterm/final (the questions are finalized in MN, not in AZ). 

• Other Websites

  • Histology Guide - this is a fantastic resource for histology. This website contains many practice slides organized by body system, along with an amazing section on tissue look-a-likes. Each slide has a text description of the major cell types along with a hyperlink that takes you to a good example within the image. There is even a section for you to quiz yourself. 

  • Youtube Channels - Histology Helper - Great resource if you are a visual learner that will talk you through slides from different tissues. 

• First Aid & Anki - First Aid does not have a histology section because it is not a high-yield subject for STEP 1. There are also not many anki cards related to histology in Anking, but some of our classmates made a histology anki deck specific to our course if you find flashcards to be a good learning tool. 

• Bootcamp - Bootcamp is a question bank with a section dedicated to histology. If you are having problems identifying tissues in slide pictures, this would be a good resource to look into. There are about 1600 questions in the histology section, and they are broken into topics. There will be questions that are irrelevant to the class, but you can simply skip those. 

• Student Made Resources - There are multiple study guides made by students. The following is a helpful review of organology. If you can’t find them, ask an upperclassman.

  • “Organology Super Duper Summary” 

  • “Histology Organ Review” 

  • Useful study guides are written by - Megan Campany or Summer Ghaith

  • Joocer's 3rd Party Schedule