First Exam

My first exam (other than my drug test - which I passed!) will be this Friday. The exam consists of two parts: a written exam and a practical exam.

The written portion of the exam is computer based and is taken using software that we had installed on our own laptops. All of the M1s will take this portion of the exam at 8am on Friday. The written part of the exam is seventy-five questions. Twenty of these questions are from embryology. Considering we only had four lectures on embryology, this is a heavily skewed distribution. The reasoning given to us for this skewed distribution toward embryology is that they didn't want us to blow it off because it was such a small portion of what we've covered. Blowing off embryology was exactly what I was planning on doing since anatomy is so much more of a focus - but obviously I can't do that now! The remaining fifty-five questions come from the anatomy that we have covered (and will cover this week). This includes the back, the upper limb, and the lower limb. For those parts of the body, we need to know all of the muscles, nerves, blood vessels, bones, ligaments, etc. For every muscle, we need to know all of the attachments, what nerve innervates it, what artery supplies it, what vein drains it, and where it is in relation to other muscles. The amount of information that we are expected to master adds up so quickly. There are sixteen muscles just in the hand to give you some idea of how much we have covered just for this first exam. The hand and forearm were covered in a one hour lecture!

The other half of our exam is the practical exam. This portion of the exam is in the cadaver lab and uses our cadavers. The class will have different assigned times for this portion of the exam since it would be chaos to have all 225+ of us in the lab at the same time. The instructors will tag structures that we need to identify. For example, they can wrap a string around a specific muscle and ask us to name the muscle. They can also wrap a muscle and ask us what innervates it or what artery supplies it. Arteries, nerves, and ligaments can also be tagged. There are fifty questions on the practical. Also included in the practical could be recognizing structures on x-rays, ultrasounds, MRIs or CT scans.

Of the 125 total questions (75 written, 50 practical), we have to get a 70% to pass. The computer program gives us a score for the written portion instantly when we submit the exam, but this isn't our final grade. The practical has to be added to our score and the score on the written exam can change. Inevitably, med students argue that certain questions were worded unfairly or contained conflicting answers and we are able to convince the instructors that certain questions should be thrown out - which tends to raise everyone's score. These instances where med students temporarily think they are law students arguing in court usually get a few questions thrown out or graded differently.

I'm a little nervous about the exam since it's hard to know what exactly to expect. The instructors have been really good about helping us know what to expect on the written portion through posting practice quizzes, but I'm not sure how representative those are to the actual exam. Some of the M2s put together a practice practical as well so that we can see how we are doing with our studying. Mostly, I'm just ready to be done with this first exam and have it behind me. After this exam I will be over 1/3 done with anatomy and will finally have a weekend off! The greatest part about the structure of the curriculum is that after an exam we have the weekend free. The next unit hasn't started and only the ridiculously motivated (and crazy) students that want to get way ahead start studying before the unit starts. I certainly will NOT be studying that weekend.