Tales of a med student - Exams, tough or what?

Finally after having started my third year at med school it was time for the first exam to be taken, yesterday after quite a long time of studying the moment of truth was there. Would my efforts put into studying be sufficient enough to make me pass this exam or will I flunk? The [...]

Finally after having started my third year at med school it was time for the first exam to be taken, yesterday after quite a long time of studying the moment of truth was there. Would my efforts put into studying be sufficient enough to make me pass this exam or will I flunk? The moment of truth on that will probably have to wait a couple of weeks again, but there’s a lot of mixed feelings on the exam from many students.

Although some questions were obvious there were also questions amongst them to which you could put your doubts on which of the choices the answer would be, mostly the subject of debate were figures taken on risk factors. One of the examples on that was smoking over 10 cigarettes a day being an absolute contra-indication for hormonal anti conception, keyword here is over, which on the exam was transformed into a case of a person smoking 10 cigarettes a day.

Would smoking 10 cigarettes a day be counted as over 10 cigarettes a day or not? Mathematically it would be incorrect, but of course it’s simply up to who wrote the question here on to determine which option should be picked. Although dubious questions like this do get scrapped at times, that definitely isn’t always the case.

Another example of something being clearly wrong was in a pedigree chart, with in mind a hereditary disease the question was what the relation of the patients mother would be to another person in the pedigree chart. However the pedigree chart linked the patient’s father to the rest of the family rather than the mother, so the mother wouldn’t have any relation. According to the correct answer later however the role of the father was assigned to the mother, making the pedigree chart drawn wrong.

Yet another example of a question which can be debated on whether to scrap it, assign points for those which concluded there wasn’t a family relation present or some alternative.

I suppose it’s just like with any other exam going to be simply waiting on what will happen and how this will eventually influence our results, of course we can only hope for our benefit but it hasn’t always been the case with that.

Directly after it today we also had another clinical session followed by a practical session about 4~5 hours later, fortunately enough me and a couple of others managed to get in on an earlier session of that so we only had to wait around 2 hours. Compared to the previous years though where exams were followed with a weekend this is a lot more demanding and it also showed in the lack of preparation done for today.

Especially with the clinical session I’d say it was a badly chosen moment, for it to be truly effective it requires preparation but that just isn’t possible if you come home from an exam late in the afternoon and find out you still have to make up a differential diagnosis of 20 possible diseases along with symptoms and think of what a patient would come to you with in case they have that certain disease, what would they say and how to differentiate them from each other.

Luckily enough though with all of that behind it means that the upcoming period will not be too demanding, I’ll be taking it easy during the upcoming week probably and then use the weekend as moment to catch up with the assignments.

Tonight though I’m going to take a good night’s rest, the last two days I’ve simply missed out on that and I can definitely feel it. Especially when you’re doing nothing else but waiting for the next session to start it’s like you could collapse and just fall asleep at any moment or place.