This week I passed my ASCP MLS BOC first try with a score of 624, and since I’ve seen a lot of posts like this here (which helped me a lot, by the way), I’d like to share how I prepared to try to help anyone who might be struggling with where to start. I’m sorry if this is too long, but I’ll try to be as detailed as possible
First, I’d like to add that I graduated in Brazil, four years ago, and in my country the course structure is VERY different from the US, so I really struggled with some topics. Blood Banking was the most challenging one to me, because here we don’t have several BB institutions like they do in America. Instead, each state has one centralized BB and you can only work with immunohematology if you work for them and you need a post-grad for that, so I had little to no immunohema in college (situation was so critical that we don’t even learn about ABO codominance in college lol). So if I could pass, anyone can, really
I’ve been studying by myself since February and at first I was super confused with the resources I should use and ended up gathering so much material it overwhelmed me. In the end, I figured that all I needed were four things: a LabCE subscription (it’s expensive but really, REALLY worth it), the BOC study guide, the ASCP quick compendium of medical laboratory sciences, and the ASCP MLS online review course. Three out of the four resources I used were made by ASCP themselves and trust me when I say that they’re the most helpful out of everything else because they really focus on what the exam wants from you and the wording they use
What I’d do was basically watch the online course video lessons for a topic, then do a set of questions from the study guide. For those who don’t know, right under the rationale for each question in the answers section, they tell you the exact paragraph from the quick compendium book where that information was taken from, so for every question I got wrong, I’d go to the quick compendium and read the entire paragraph or the entire section about it. I kept a little “mistake book” where I noted the most critical things I missed and went back to it every single day. I tried using the purple and yellow book as well and it did help me with some mnemonics but I didn’t find the explanations there to be very helpful since they were too concise and I needed some more context, so it wasn’t really essential for me to pass
As for LabCE, it really helped with the CAT simulators, because it gives you mixed questions (which the study guide doesn’t bc it’s divided by topics and subtopics) and helps you manage your time so you don’t have too much trouble with it during the test. I always took a 50 question set of selected areas whenever I finished a topic, and then read through the rationale of each one of them, even the ones I got right, because LabCE, unlike the BOC study guide, not only explains the right answer, but also explains why the others were wrong. As for the CAT simulators, I started taking at least one every single day after I felt like I had learned enough content in different areas, and did this for about two months, to the point where I was pretty convinced I had seen every question in their bank. I kept updating my mistake book all the time and never let go of it, took it with me everywhere and would skim through it whenever I had the time to get as much content into my head as possible
About the test itself, it was easier than I expected. Much, much easier than LabCE for sure, so if you’re scoring around 55% on LabCE with an average difficulty of 5.5-6+ you’re probably safe. I had a lot of questions where it gave me a bunch of results and asked me what I should do next, so I recommend you try to build some clinical reasoning when studying instead of memorizing a lot of specific, super deep concepts that have like .01% chance of showing up on the test. I also recommend you manage your time in a way that you can take at least 30 minutes to review your answers, because sometimes you can remember the answer of a question from another one that shows up next. also because you’ll probably be feeling a lot less tense when you finish answering all 100 questions and if you go back you’ll be able to think more clearly about the ones you were unsure of
Again, I apologize if this is too long (it definitely is lol), but I did try to be very detailed and hope this helps anyone who might be freaking out bc of the exam, because I was
And now, I can finally use this pic (:
Edit: I mentioned that the BOC study guide doesn’t have mixed questions, but I forgot to mention something I did a few days before the exam that might help you guys as well: since I had seen pretty much all hard questions from LabCE already, I took my study guide book and manually wrote down the numbers of every single “MLS only” question from every chapter (since those are harder and would be worth more points on the actual test), then I sent chatGPT pictures of the entire summary of the book, the ASCP breakdown of the test with the number of questions from each area, and the hard questions I wrote down, and prompted it to make me a full, 100-question mock exam, mixing the MLS only questions with the normal ones, and that was pretty useful. Since the summary contains the question numbers for each topic (like “electrolytes: 100-140”) I could get a pretty good list of which questions I should do. Sure, it wasn’t adaptive, but if you don’t have the money for a LabCE subscription or have seen all the hard questions like me, that might help you get a good idea of how you’ll do in the exam and how many hard questions you’d get right. I aimed for at least 40% of the MLS only questions every time and timed every attempt I did. I’m not sure I made myself clear here, but I can DM the prompt I used and the list chatgpt gave me if anyone is wondering what it looks like
