exams
You are viewing stuff tagged with exams.
You are viewing stuff tagged with exams.
Suppose you’re taking a class on medieval history and the final exam is coming up. The final exam is supposed to be a test of your knowledge of medieval history, right? So if you have a couple days between now and the exam, surely the best way to spend the time, if you want to do well on the exam, is to read the best books you can find about medieval history. Then you’ll know a lot about it, and do well on the exam.
No, no, no, experienced students are saying to themselves. If you merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you learned wouldn’t be on the test. It’s not good books you want to read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class. And even most of that you can ignore, because you only have to worry about the sort of thing that could turn up as a test question. You’re looking for sharply-defined chunks of information. If one of the assigned readings has an interesting digression on some subtle point, you can safely ignore that, because it’s not the sort of thing that could be turned into a test question. But if the professor tells you that there were three underlying causes of the Schism of 1378, or three main consequences of the Black Death, you’d better know them. And whether they were in fact the causes or consequences is beside the point. For the purposes of this class they are.
Before I was a senior dental student, I used to pull up their schedule online just so I could jealously admire it. “What must it be like,” I wondered, “to no longer have to go to class and just to show up in clinic each day?”
Now, I know — it. is. awesome. Through all those days and nights of studying and stressing, I’d tell Mykala “but hey, fourth year is really great!” At the time, she was understandably skeptical. But hey, this year has definitely lived up to expectations; the decrease in day-to-day stress is unbelievable. As students, we’ve started to get more leeway from our supervisors, in part because we’re rapidly talking and opining more and more like doctors and less and less like students. When people are working under your license (as we do with the dentists at the school), I’m sure it’s easy to give an almost-doctor more wiggle room than an overwhelmed second year student. So that’s nice.
I am nervous whenever I’m in the School of Dentistry in Moos Tower. Even on days like today when I have no patients scheduled, I am constantly aware of a sensation of compression: my heart beating in the back of my throat.
I noticed this today as I was pouring the stone to produce an altered cast. Nothing broke, nothing leaked, nothing was lost. We’ll get this fellow his removable partial dentures (upper and lower) in a few weeks, and things will be fine. So, it’s peculiar that I’m still so full of adrenaline — I wonder if my subconscious senses danger, even though nothing truly bad has happened at school for quite a while.
A lady in South Korea failed her driver’s license test 960 times before passing. Here’s a Korean phrase, quoted from the article:
“Sajeonogi,” or “Knocked down four times, rising up five.”
In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece for the New Yorker called “The Art of Failure — Why some people choke and others panic.” The thesis here is that choking is a reversion to basic instruction — the mechanical, poorly-coordinated, unadaptable precepts from one’s basic instruction in a skill. Sports is a great example: as one choke’s, one shows less and less of the practiced grace that come with experience and more and more of the mechanical, simplistic movement characteristic of the novice. The second part of the thesis is this: panicking is a reversion not to basic instruction but to basic instinct. A panic surpasses all training and heads right into lizard-brain survival territory. Here’s a great quote:
A list of things I should/need to know for my biochemistry test tomorrow.
Act I.
Scene 1. Saturday. The curtain rises to reveal Alex hunkered down over an organic chemistry book, solution manual, notecards and notes. He sighs and pushes his hair back from his forehead. He needs a haircut. The modification of the Wittig recation makes sense, but he wonders if he’ll be able to keep it straight from the 20 other reaction/reagent combinations he has to keep straight.
I. Am. So.
Stupid.
I think Alex Oray summed up the zeitgeist of school right now:
How many opportunities does a person get to bomb 2 exams back to back? Cherish every moment folks.
True insight, he has.
People are usually a little more talkative and relaxed in the weight room on Fridays, taking their workouts a little slower and shooting the breeze for a while. Some actually do not work out at all, but simply stand with their hand on a machine and talk nonsense. I looked like I was doing nothing, but I was actually between sets, and a guy walked up to me.
Going to the Union Gospel Mission was a good thing. For once I had the chance to volunteer without counting it for hours for any clubs or organization. I never really feel like it is volunteering if I am doing it to fulfill hours. We helped pack bags (great duffels donated by Land’s End) with personal care items for the mission’s annual Christmas outreach. I did, for the record, get my hand slammed into a car door. However, it did not even bleed, and it still plays piano fine, so things are well. Later on, it will probably go something like this: “Remember when we went to the Union Gospel Mission?” “Oh yeah, you got your hand slammed into a door.” laughter