WOW, it's been a busy few weeks and I haven't seen much of Dominican in a while. We had our first couple exams of the semester. During the anatomy practical, there were 40 questions. We were in a line, each person had 40 seconds per station where there was one body (or radiograph) tagged. You had to walk from the stations, review the question and answer the question in the 40 seconds before the bell went off telling you to go to the next station. You could NOT go back and double check any answer after the bell rang. I did very well on it and was pleased with myself (after spending much of the preceding weeks up to my elbows in a cadaver).
On Monday we had the written exam. It is very much like taking a standardized exam. All of our subjects are on one exam, which is 120 questions (you have 2.5 hours to complete it). It was horrible. After taking tests at Ross University last semester, I was shocked by this exam. Unlike last semester, it didn't closely reflect what was taught nor was the information applied clinically. However, we had more MDs teaching last semester and this semester there are more PhDs, which would change how they write questions. Not all doctorates are equal. There are different purposes of an MD, OD, or PhD and it reflects in their training and the way they teach , explain concepts and write exams. Obviously it makes the most sense to have a PhD in biochemistry teach a biochemistry course; however, if an MD taught the course it would be taught very differently as an MD would probably teach what they use daily rather than strict bench science.
I did okay on this written exam, but not as well as I expect myself to do. However, things could have been SO much worse. Rumor has it that approximately 50% of the class failed the entire exam. FAILED THE EXAM-- in every subject. There is also talk that someone got a 14% on the entire exam. That means that this person got about 16 questions correct out of the 120 questions. I think this is a person who really tried and just got really confused, because statistically they should have got at least 20-25% just by chance (given that we had 4 or 5 answer choices). Nonetheless, this was a bad exam. I don't think the grades are even finalized yet since it was so bad. There is an appeals process in which our class representatives argue that unclear questions are either thrown out of the exam or that two answers are correct (double bubble). I believe that if 75% of the class misses a question it is removed or if the top 15% of the performers on a particular exam miss a question it is also removed. THEN to complicate the situation even more, there is a 10 point range that is the mean passing score(MPS) can fall into, which is based upon how the class performs on the exam. The MPS; however, is not a curve. Generally with a curve, a certain percentage of the class must fail, but with the MPS system , no one has to fail the exam. Basically, you need a doctorate to understand the grading system--then again not all doctorates are created equally.
Anyway, I've decided that these PhDs are not going to get the best of me. In addition to my beautiful notes (Farley and I might just have to copyright them*), I'm taping myself reading these amazing notes and listening to them pretty much when I'm not in class (I'm even listening to them right now....Hemophilia A is a deficiency in Factor VIII and it is an X linked disease). They are even on my iPod. I know you are jealous: if you want to listen to my saintly voice reading biochemistry/histology/anatomy/medical ethics/or physiology notes, you can let me know and I'll try to email (sell?) them to you. Oh, but one great thing is that we started hematology this week and we have been doing LOTS of medical ethics in our Doctor, Patient and Society class. At least they are playing to my strengths.
* The professors give us "learning objectives" for each lectures. Every class, Farley and I type as fast as our fingers will go and try to answer all of these objectives during class. After class, we combine our notes to make super notes. Our beautiful notes didn't miss anything on the last exam; but the professors decided to test on things that they didn't stress or mentioned in passing. (In fact, a couple questions were on things we hadn't covered yet. ) I guess I'll just memorize every single word this time.
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