Hi Ya’ll.
So, I just wanted to say that this past year was full of constantly being tested and pushing myself to my limits. Medical school is designed to do that: which is why only a select few are chosen each year and many either fail out or have to return to repeat that year. It can be rough if you aren’t on your game.
I wanted to take a look back at all of the exams, quizzes, and other testing hurdles I had as a first year. Before I even begin to take a look, I already know it’s going to be a lot.
I do know that they are changing the way they did things from my year to the class of 2023’s first year. I have a suspicion that you all will get tested less often, but that you may get more questions per exam. That is how they are planning on testing my class (2022) for our second year; or at least what they told us anyways.
Pros and cons to this:
Pros: Less exams constantly creeping up on you. There were many weeks this year where I had to either pick and choose which exams I wanted to focus my time on, or just do a bit for each exam and potentially not score as well as I wanted to. Simply, because I would have multiple tests (in any form) in that particular week as scheduling wasn’t ideal.
Cons: More questions. Which means longer exams. Longer endurance. Harder to focus. May be harder to come back from one bad test grade.
Ya’ll get my point.
Anywho, here is the breakdown:
| Name of the Course | Quizzes | Written Exams | Practicals | CSA's or CPA's |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PCM | 0 | 2 | 3 | 1 |
| OS | 5 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| MCM | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| MSK | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| HDM | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| CP | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Renal | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Bioethics | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Med Info | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Total 1st semester: 47
| Name of Course | Quizzes | Written Exams | Practicals | CSA's or CPA's |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PCM | 0 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| OS | 5 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| GI | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Endo/Repro | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Neuro | 0 | 3 | 2 | 0 |
| MOD | 1 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| Intro to Research | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Med Info | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Total 2nd semester: 50
Looking at it in table form, it doesn’t seem like so much. However, when counting it out–> Yikes!
Now, for things like Med Info we usually worked together. They changed this course from the 2021 year to our year so that way we’d have 2 years of Med Info instead of 1…. I’m honestly not sure this class was super helpful. Particularly because a handful of students did research before coming or in COB (at least my year) we had a mini-thesis. So myself and my fellow COB-to-COMers already had an idea of how to use the databases that KCU had.
For the Intro to Research course, I did all of these in one day on my spring break. They weren’t necessarily difficult, just time consuming. There were a few CITI trainings we had to do for this course as well that I didn’t count. But maybe I should have…because they were very long and tedious.
All in all, it was a lot. It seemed like every week we had a quiz, test, or some sort of competency. Sometimes we had multiple in one week. I’m hoping that the school took at least our classes’ concerns about scheduling/testing into consideration for future years to come!
