A question about work ethics.

[Guest Beaver]

I agree totally that many exams in the more advanced years require a great deal of thinking, but what I found with many first year courses was that there was a lot of spewing out info from lectures and the text. Thats why getting the info into your head for courses like first year bio is more important. However if the exam is something like Calculus (lots of thinking) then its probably better to have a good night's sleep.

[Guest UWOMED2005]

Good point. . . that's probably why I did better in the latter years of my degree. . .

[Guest me]

Lol! Lots of people can think perfectly clearly with little sleep ... we're all gonna have to do that if we become doctors, after all!

 

Personally, I'd like to have doctors who can think through a diagnosis even if they're at the tail end of a 36 hour shift...

[Guest aneliz]

While we are talking about studying....

 

I have often found it useful to 'analyse' the prof. What do they think is important? What do they talk about a lot? Did they drop any 'hints' about the exam? What is their area of research? Sometimes this type of logic can maximise your mark. I'll give you an example from human anatomy:

 

Practical exam, at the first station I come to their is an eyeball, upside down on the table (you cannot see the lacrimal gland). We are not allowed to touch the specimen. The question asks: what is the innervation of this muscle? One of the extrinsic muscles of the eye is pinned. Because you can't see the lacrimal gland, it is impossible to distinguish medial and lateral. So, most people spent their 1 minute at this station hanging upside down, straining to *try* and see a lacrimal gland somewhere. But the easier method to getting this question right is to think about what the prof would think. There are 4 rectus muscles on the eye. 3/4 are innervated by the occulomotor nerve. 1 (the lateral) is innervated by the abducens nerve. Is the prof more likely to ask the exception or the rule? That's right, the exception! Answer to the question (without panic and without hanging upside down) is the abducens nerve!

 

Another example: multiple choice, cumulative final exam in anatomy. You could spend about three hours learning the bronchopulmonary segments of the lung OR you can think about the prof. If she asks a question about bronchopulmonary segments it will only be one question (ie one mark out of about 150). She is unlikely to ask this because she HATES bronchopulmonary segments. She is a physiotherapist so it is much more in your interests to spend the 3 hours that you would have spent memorising bronchopulmonary segments learning origins and insertions of muscles. Being a more musculoskeletal person, she is much more likely to ask questions about muscles than lungs.

 

This type of analysis of the prof will work in ALL of your courses. Spend some time thinking about the instructor and their likes and dislikes, special pet topics and the ways that they are likely to ask questions. This allows you to efficiently study and maximise the number of marks you can get with the time that you have available .

 

[Guest UWOMED2005]

Good point Aneliz. While I'm firmly behind the idea that you're studying to understand the material and not 'placate the prof'/'just get good marks,' figuring out what the prof thinks is important in the material, and ALSO what they believe to be true. Often there are a number of differing viewpoints on 'the facts'. . . but in terms of getting good marks unfortunately often the "right" answer is the "prof's" answer.

 

As to 'me' - personally I'd prefer to NOT HAVE PHYSICIANS WORK 36 HOUR SHIFTS (the whole idea seems ridiculous to me & an example of the medical profession trying to be 'macho'), but those are the realities of the system in place. But in terms of getting good grades on University exams, I think you're better off with the sleep.

[Guest Kirsteen]

Hey there aneliz,

 

Holy cow, that's a neat approach to studying. Although, again, it all boils down to approaching studying in the way that best fits you as I don't know if my interpretive skills re: pre-empting how the prof will think are that up to par to be as reliable as yours! Personally, if I don't study every bit of minutiae (which can be, admittedly, a big, horrendous pain in the bum!) and try to understand it all before going into a test, my confidence level going into the test plummets.

 

With respect to tackling the minutiae (and I'm not saying that you don't do this, by the way!), I severely ignored the importance of it during my early undergrad years, which led to a bit of a slaughterhouse of a GPA. :x I'll give you an example: when I left high school my brain totally dug chemistry and man, did chemistry like me. When I first took university chemistry it was a full year course; the final was cumulative; I can't remember how much it was worth, but it was a bloody lot, and it was purported to cover all of the material equally. However, one of the profs (and we had about five or so in total) had given us a set of lectures--about only four in total--covering some more nebulous (read: advanced) areas of chemistry (something along the lines of experimental electron cloud phenomena) the info for which was not included in our textbook, but appeared in a set of handouts he provided, consisting of ~5 pages.

 

So the final exam rolls around... There we are, 500 or so students herded into the one gym; the test is not multiple choice, it's short- to medium-answer; they give us the green light to start, we flip over the exam, and I start going through the pages to see what's ahead. To my abject horror, ~40% of the exam questions were based on that five-page electron cloud handout. Yeh, I'd read it and reviewed its cute little pictures, but had I stuffed it into any iron maiden of a memory--nope-a! Not even close. ...and there I am trying to come up with ~40% of an exam's worth of out-there stuff on electron clouds. I'm not joking about this: two or three people in the hall were openly crying, and quite a few others threw in the towel, seemingly early. You can imagine that it was less than pretty. Welcome to university, Kirsteen: chemistry don't like you here!

 

Back to study skills though, coming back to undergrad, and probably with that nasty exam in mind, the study habits changed dramatically. I since devised a system which seems to have worked (for me) quite nicely, but man, is it labour intensive. Basically, it involves transcribing every lecture and then going back through each lecture and making a list of questions for each to lecture that addresses every point given. By the time the test rolls around my agenda is to have every single question answered with no hesitation. Using this method I've done pretty well at UT, especially with those multiple choice monsters, and so many times when writing exams I couldn't believe some of the tiny, wee points that were selected by the profs to be covered as substantial parts on an exam.

 

In any case, to be truthful, I'm a bit worried. Although the above system has worked nicely for the UT undergrad science experience, given the reports from some of the current med school denizens on the board, it sounds like the above method is going to drive me into a bit of a white coat with long arms when meds rolls around. So for you guys who are currently dealing with the "fire hydrants flow" of med school knowledge what sorts of methods do you use to study all that info? Would you mind dishing out some of those pearls?!

 

Cheers,

Kirsteen

[Guest PeterHill0501]

analiz,

 

My strategy is somewhat of a blend between how you study and how others in this forum study. I really enjoy lectures as I find it provides me with the 'direction' you talk about. I use the profs interests and focii during lectures to guide the top level of studying. Once I've mastered that level, I then proceed to learning as much minutia and peripheral material as possible. I guess the other strategy is to continually try to focus back to the big picture..."what does all this mean"..."how does a particular system work as a whole". I find by going from the broad picture, down into the minutia, back up into the big picture provides meaning to the bits of stuff in memory. I really hate memorizing...I much prefer to understand a system as a whole.

[Guest aneliz]

Hey guys,

 

My point wasn't that this is the 'best' way to study or the only way to study. It is simply the way that I maximise marks if I am pressed for study time. Given adequate time, I also like to 'get the whole picture' and learn more than 'what the prof thinks'. However, when time is tight or when there is too much trivia (as in a cumulative anatomy exam), I find that the 'prof analysis' technique has been very rewarding. So, use it as you see fit. It is sometimes frustrating that the 'right' answer is what the prof thinks. Often it is best to know 'what the prof thinks' for exam purposes and learn the material in your own way for your own purposes. Cheers All!!