Thursday, June 24, 2010

A well-deserved break

Well, my exams have finished, so I'm back. And what a better way to welcome me back to Blogger than the announcement that I have 4 spam comments to be moderated! Such a comforting thought, to know that these people are bothering to attempt to spam this blog with advertisements for chinese webcam sites and whatnot. But anyway...
My mid-year semester examinations were comprised of four papers; a MEQ (Multiple-Mini Essay paper), SAQ (Short-answer), MCQ (Multiple-choice) and an Anatomy Spot Test (the second one so far, we had one in semester two, last year). Suffice to say, I believe that this time around, my marks compared to last years will be lower, despite putting more effort into studying; the role with the student union has actually made me more inspired to study harder, paradoxically. The exams were quite a mixed bag in my opinion; the MEQ and Spot Test were filled with things I managed to only gloss over in my study (although entirely my fault, an example of this was not covering Chronic Renal Failure enough whilst covering every other pathology of renal disease possible; and knowing in great detail the structure of bones for the spot test which was never utilised), but to balance things out, the SAQ and MCQ had quite familiar questions which were answerable. The MCQ was a special test to note, since we had two sessions that were essentially filled with practice MCQs that could come up; once again, the number of MCQs repeated from previous years was a significant number; to the extent that I would confident in saying I would expect no more than single-digit numbers of people failing that exam. Essentially, if you were to memorise all the practice MCQs given out, and guessed the remainder, then assuming you have a 1 in 4 chance of getting those guessed questions right, you would be very, very, very close to passing.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing; in fact, I don't think failing future doctors on whether they can recall every detail of a cellular mechanism so they can find the answer that is INCORRECT, is essential, in this stage. Yes, doctors are responsible for people's lives, but at this stage, we're still medical students in pre-clinical years, and performances in OSCEs and the results of clinical years are more important. Regardless, it is one exam and shouldn't make much of a difference in the overall scheme of things.

Post-exam period mood: Nonchalant. Once again, the post-exam feeling of "I feel like I should be studying but I don't have to" has settled, and I'm inclined to start studying for next semester, although I feel like I may want to wrap up last semester with a nice concise book of notes. These holidays are going to be a bit different from the last ones though - now that there aren't any exams, it's full throttle to student union and general university affairs, as well as more personal ones like preparing to take my P's test (provisional driving license - i.e. license to drive unsupervised, for all those non-Australian/non-NSWers reading) and finishing Big Bang Theory. Also on the agenda is sleeping more, eating more, and exercising more; very important things that I didn't get as much of as I would've liked to during the exam period... speaking of which, a siesta sounds mighty alluring right now. Time to nod off..

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