First full week of med school classes down. First real med school test down. My goal is to get a 4.0 this semester and next; while that might be a lofty goal, I feel that with my experience and also with the awesome setup I have as far as technology, free time, etc... I should be able to attain that goal. I have found a study group of four other married and "old" (over 25) med students. We met informally a few times last week and formally in a coffee shop this past Saturday. We decided to make up possible test questions to quiz each other with and that seems to help. I think we will continue doing that at some sort of interval, not sure when yet, still working out the details. What I noticed when I was studying for this first test is that everything I do (sleep, eat, gym, laundry, groceries, Stargate Atlantis etc...) is at the expense of something else. This is true of anyone, if you watch Judge Judy you can't be watching Dr. Phil. (well unless you have DVR or two TVs etc...) But you get my point. There is such a time requirement with med school (e.g. reading 9 chapters of Guyton and Hall in 3 days) that you can't possibly get it all done unless you are on some super stimulant medication and then I'm not sure if the DOING would convert to REMEMBERING. So, we're left with prioritization. I'm in the phase where I need to figure out what activities gain me the most points on the test. Do I get the most learning out of reading and outlining chapters? Re-listening to lectures? Does going to the gym occasionally actually help me in that it is healthy for my body and thus helps with life support for my brain. I think I have decided that reading the chapters is not as value-added as perhaps focusing on lecture material. I do however think that I should have focused more on making flashcards earlier in the game and started learning from them each night. After the test, I did some much neglected tasks such as grocery shopping, laundry and a general tidying up of my apartment. Basically hitting the 'reset' button for next test. Doing these tasks has meant that I didn't review Monday's lecture as thoroughly as I might have or should have.
How did I feel about the test. First of all I feel like I studied my BUTT off. I'm not used to getting a good grade on tests all the time. But I am used to, if I put forth the effort I did on this test I should feel very comfortable with the material and like I for sure got an A after. I don't feel that way. In fact I know I missed some questions. I knew going into it that med school is hard and the tests are hard. I thought the hardness was more so from volume of information. It seems to me that some of the test questions were intentionally tricky. Without saying exactly what the question was, one question involved multiple facts, (5% D5W is iso-tonic and then becomes hypotonic as it is metabolized, the interstitium is 2/3 of total body water while the ECF is 1/3....) Simply knowing these facts doesn't mean that you would have necessarily chosen the right answer. What I am saying is that the questions were multi step and if you didn't get all the steps right, you wouldn't have gotten the question right. Similar to a math problem with multiple choice answers I guess. You don't get partial credit. Another factor affecting my test was timing. You get 90 seconds per question. Going into it I thought that was ample time. On the MCAT you only get 60; and next year we will only get 60. When the proctor announced that we were halfway through I was only about 35-40% through the questions. I rushed to the end of the test, filled in my scan-tron bubbles and then worked backwards through the questions I rushed through in order to check for any mistakes I might have made while rushing. I did change maybe 2-3 answers at that point. (they say never change an answer on a test and I have told my students not to do so multiple times) There is another answer that I wish I had changed but didn't. Finally, this test does not comprise as many questions as a 'normal' test would in this program. The test was only over 6 (4 hour) lectures rather than the typical 8. Consequently, missing just a few problems in each topic (physio grade is counted separately from bio-chem etc...) would mean that your percentage points drop dramatically. I think I figured that you could only miss 4 physio questions to still get an A. While this is also sort of a good thing in that not a huge amount of the total questions for the semester were on this test, if one were to go solely on points, this might be a problem.
At any rate, the AA for the class now goes and runs the scan-trons through, and there is a slight chance that they might throw out questions that a lot of people miss. This would work well if it is a question I also missed but against me if it is a question I got right, by lowering the points possible. I hope I am worrying about nothing, but I feel like I did not get an A in all categories.
Two quotes seem appropriate for me at this point:
"A failure is a success if you learn from it" - Malcom Forbes and
"I am a human being, not a human doing. Don't equate your self-worth with how well you do things in life. You aren't what you do. If you are what you do, then when you don't...you aren't." - Dr. Wayne Dyer
So, even if I feel I could have done better on this test, if I figure out what I did wrong and don't make those mistakes again, it would still be a worthwhile learning experience. And, even if I do poorly, I am more than just a test or a med school.... yada yada yada
When we go over this test on Thursday I am going to try to find out why I missed each question and come up with how I can fix this problem in the future.
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