Dear Friend,

My memory sucks. I struggle with where I left my keys, let alone things like where the murmur of mitral valve prolapse is best auscultated. Pneumonics never helped, either. It felt like I was trying to memorize unrelated facts so that I could remember other unrelated facts.

I moved on to brute-force memorization. Thousands and thousands of flashcards. Reading and rereading. Hours and hours forcing my brain into submission.

If you've been there, you know how frustrating it is. You know that your brain has a mind of its own. Brute force memorization is like swimming against the current. You can do it, but it's draining AND time-consuming.

Well, here's the good news. After hundreds of hours spent struggling through PA school, I figured it out. You see, I'm always testing out new ways of doing things. I saw PA school as a laboratory for learning to study and take tests. I ran experiment after experiment on myself and my brain. Then I watched what happened with my test scores. And one day, I found it. I discovered a secret weapon that helped me move from struggling to the top of my class.

Here's what l stumbled onto. I noticed that if there were a question on a quiz or an exam, that bit of information would stick. It'd get stuck in my brain like a dinosaur in a tar pit. Heck, looking back now, I still remember questions I got wrong over 16 years ago. Once I noticed that phenomenon, I jumped on it.

I must have written 10,000 questions in PA school and shared them with my classmates. They couldn't wait to get their hands on my questions because they found that my methods worked for them too. Naturally, when I began to study for my PANRE, I began with question banks. I answered hundreds of full-length PANCE-type questions. And it worked great, except for one critical problem.  

It takes FOREVER to answer full-length PANCE. I didn’t have the kind of time I’d need to read those questions in that much depth AND get through the material that I needed. It just wasn't going to be efficient enough.  

I knew answering questions was the best method to get the material to stick in my brain, but how could I get through more material, more questions? Then it hit me like a garbage truck. Make the questions shorter!

So I built The Final Step for me out of short, punchy questions so that I could fly through tons of materials and use this amazing phenomenon to help my memory.  Once I saw how to break the questions down into these shorter questions, I could also see how these TFS questions were the Lego blocks for the longer PANCE questions. I was learning more, retaining more, doing it faster than ever before, and not missing out on a thing! Once I mentioned my personal question bank on the PAER podcast, I was inundated with requests for access to it, and The Final Step was born.

Later, I discovered that I wasn’t the first person to notice this Jedi mind trick. It’d been studied and PROVEN to work. It's called The Testing Effect.  

The bottom line is that there are better ways to learn and better ways to get your brain to remember things.

Reading and rereading your notes and textbooks is the WORST way to study. The worst! Hours and hours go by, and you can’t even remember what was on the previous page. Listening to lectures is hardly any better. You feel like you’re paying attention. You’re taking notes, but when you get home, there’s almost nothing in your brain.

The Final Step is designed to get you swimming with the current, running downhill. The Final Step was designed with proven methods for retaining information in mind. Proven methods like:

The Final Step is made up of over 2,000 short quick questions so you can fly through the material. In Section A, these questions are organized by topic for easy review. In Section B, all 2,000 questions are mixed together so that you don't know what's coming next—the best of both worlds.

Get Started and Get Better, 

Brian Wallace, PA-C