Friday, March 16, 2007
a fun exam!
after reading zejia's blog i felt quite tickled by his description of our anat spots exam! maybe cos i was in first slot so i wasn't subject to all the nerves la, not like there was a lot of time for us to get nervous...poor last slot pple though. however, let me give a different account of that particular exam haha.about 5 minutes before the start of the exam, the prof gives us a briefing about what to look out for, eg look for the red sticker arrows on bones, xrays etc pointing to the structure to be identified/referred to, and the yellow pins that indicate the location of a certain structure on the cadaver that the question is referring to. after that, we put on our lab coats, troop down to the anat hall where the exam is held, go in and sit at any station.
the anat hall is a rectangular room that's pretty big. the stations are arranged like the outline of a squarish letter C...meaning they hug the walls of the room, and snake in and out. you know, like this...
___________________
| aa________________|
| ai|________________
|__________________|
yup. so you start at any station, and just keep moving to your right until you come round to your same starting station again. so i started at the microscope bit, then moved on to the xrays, and through all the cadavers, back to the microscopes. each station is actually just a stool you sit on, with a specimen in front of you if it's for part a of the question.
in our question paper there are 50 questions, all divided into parts a and b. part a usually requires you to identify a specific bit of the specimen, and part b asks things like what it does, what happens if damaged or blocked; mainly stuff that is clinically related. at each station you have 40 seconds (i saw the stopwatch in the guy's hand haha), then this guy rings a bell, and you move on to the next station. sounds exciting eh? at the very first station, i looked at the microscope slide, thought a while, wrote what i thought was the answer and the bell went DING! it was incredibly fast, so much so that if you don't know the answer, there isn't too much time to fabricate stuff!
so the exam just goes on, with us moving on and on through the stations. and before you know it, you're back at the original station and the exam's over! 1.5 hours never ever passed by faster, and it didn't even feel like 100 stations. that's the most fun and exciting exam i've ever taken...if any other exams to date could be described as such. my senior's right about the exam: it feels like a game show (: though i didn't think it could be so before the exam. and at the end of it, you're sitting in the same seat you started in, looking at everyone else in the same position. that made me feel like the exam hadn't started yet...must be part of the anat dept's wicked sense of humour, to make you relive the entire thing!
so there you have it, both sides of the story yay =)
yueyen at 6:13 PM