Okay. You’ve finally finished your courses and taken your final exams. You are so close to being done you can almost taste it! And then FREEDOM!
Well, at least for a bit. If the goal is medical school your freedom will be short lived. But hey! At least you’ll get a fancy degree!
What is on the exam?
160 questions are on the comprehensive exam. The breakdown includes 20 questions exactly from each “core” class. No more, no less. Each professor typically holds a review for their class. Sometimes they will hold multiple. So, if a professor teaches more than one class, you will have more than one review with them (usually anyways).
These are the following core classes:
- Anatomy I
- Anatomy II –> You will have one review (or at least we did) for both anatomy courses.
- Physiology I
- Physiology II –> Same thing as anatomy, one review. Or however Dr. Anderson does it for that year.
- Molecular–> We had 3 reviews, one for each professor that taught.
- Biochem –> we had 3 reviews just like molecular.
- Epi –> He had us pick questions during the review. DO NOT SOLELY RELY ON THIS. Maybe all of the questions we picked ended up being on the second chance exam? But not many of the questions we picked ended up on our exam…
- Immuno. We had a review, but in our year immuno was in the spring so we didn’t need that much of a refresher course.
Some of your professors will point you in somewhat of a direction, but others will tell you to basically know everything from their course.
Additional Information on the Comp Exam:
You will have 2 weeks to review. A week of straight reviews, and a week to study completely without any other commitments from the school. Or at least that is how they ran it during my year (2017-2018).
You will also have 2 tries to take it. The first try, and then if you don’t pass, you take it a week later. The second exam will have an entirely new set of questions, so don’t waste your time trying to remember any of the questions you had on the first exam. Professors are required to give double the number of exam questions to what they will put on the exam for this reason.
Originally we were told that we would find out later in the day what our scores were after that first try. However, we didn’t find out until the following Monday or Tuesday. It was a bit frustrating, as many of us wanted to know if we needed to start studying again. If we did, then we lost out on all that time to study over the weekend before our scores were given.
I’m not sure how many people did not pass on the first try. You need a 70% or above to pass and they do not tell you your score. They only tell you if you pass or fail. I believe if you fail you can review what you got wrong. But, seeing as I personally did not have to go that route and don’t know anyone (or wasn’t close enough to anyone) who had to retake it, I can’t give you any more information.
Mini-Thesis:
In previous years, the students had to do a presentation in front of their class and their administrators. Long story short, that was cut back due to students having a bad relationship with a former dean and their ability to get into KCU-COM. I won’t necessarily go through all the juicy deets that were handed down, but apparently “all the rumors are true” from a previous student.
So. In order to avoid that monstrosity, our year had to do a mini-thesis. It could be on anything we wanted, but it had to be 25 pages. Which was SO. DAMN. HARD.
IDK about you, but uh, I didn’t have a ton that I wanted to write about. Either topics were too broad or too narrow. It’s hard to write something decent when you have a page limit. I understand having a thesis is long, but in majority of those cases you are going through every painstaking step from start to finish. And you are doing all the work. With a mini-thesis, you are basically just doing a literature review.
In E’s case, he used the data that he collected from some of his published papers, but overall he just did a lit review based on a topic that he had already written several papers on. He was also very well versed in his subject. So he didn’t struggle as hard to find his resources as I personally did, just because he already knew where he was getting most of his information from. His only big obstacle was writing.
I chose to do mine on an ENT topic (since I had worked in ENT last as a scribe and it was the most interesting to me at the time) and antibiotics. Mine was definitely hard to find information on. Well, good information anyways.
But I digress.
A lot of people had issues writing this mini thesis.
The other issue we had is different professors had different levels of caring on how well your mini-thesis was. Some of them automatically gave an A if you turned it in and hit the required page numbers and required amount of resources. Mine, however, wanted to act like we were actually getting published and expected a lot more. Which was very unfair, given how some professors didn’t have high standards.
Ultimately, none of the professors really wanted to deal with this mini-thesis. This, and in combination with it not being uniform (a complaint of ours) lead to them scrapping this as a potential end of the year project on top of the comprehensive exam.
For the 2018-2019 class, they didn’t have any projects to do. The COB professors must not have agreed on what end of the year project to have the students do OR just didn’t hammer out the details for this year. Who knows, maybe they won’t do a project anymore!
Hope this helps. Cheers!
