6-March, Cloudy. When a person is too free like me, I tend to think back something happen in the past. It has been so fast that I'm now a fourth year medical student if I pass my exam. Passing exam has been so difficult for medical students (sorry, if u don’t think so). What I mean is that the probability is there and you can’t really control the exam and its result. This is because anything can happen in the exam. You might get a malignant examiner or a difficult patient. When students from other courses are aiming for A’s (which is my target in my secondary school), we indeed are struggling hard to aim for a pass.
Let me tell you what is so hard about medicine in UKM. Our exam under this new curriculum and ISO9001 is divided into three components: Continuous assessment, Paper, and OSCE.
Continuous assessments include logbook assessment and Long case assessment. Logbook assessment is quite easy as you just need to complete all the procedures and observation that need to be done in the wards and attend all the teaching given by your supervisors, then you can get quite a good marks. Long case had been a bit hard for some of us. Long case includes clerking a patient in front of an examiner, present the history and do the physical examination on the spot. For internal medicine, the scope is too wide. You never know what case you will get (i.e. neuro, haemato, cardio, respi, git, renal, endo…) Then, some examiner will continue with investigations. However, for third year they don’t expect much management.
Then, we talk about paper. It consists of One Best Answer (OBA) and Key Features Question (KFQ). This is the only component which is under control.
The third component would be OSCE---a component with the highest failure rate. I really thank all the lecturers and people involved to set up this component. So much efforts was put in to transfer all the patient temporarily up to 10 th floor for this exam. It involves examining the patient with findings by MO, taking consent from the patient, moving them up, few staff nurses and Pk to follow, sending food to 10th floor, counting the time, and paying the patient for their cooperation. This exam makes me realize on why a medical school fee is so high for privates.
Why the failure rate is so high? Because you must examine the patient, present your findings and give the diagnosis in 10 minutes. One of the problems is that the scope is too wide. The question includes more than ten physical examinations. I hardly practice all of them in my eight week posting ( e.g. CVS, Respi, Upper limb, Lower limb, Cranial nerves, GIT, Cushing’s, Parkinson, Rheumato, Scleroderma,….) Some question can be tricky, “please look and proceed”. For this question, you don’t even know what system you are examining. The other problem is due to lack of practice. We can hardly remember clearly all the steps of examination.
To make the exam harder, you must pass all three components in order to pass.
There is no such thing as you are save because you do very well in continuous assessments and paper, so you decide to ignore OSCE.
In other word, you may fail even you get A for this subject but you fail one of the component.
Through this post, I hope some of our juniors can get a rough idea on third year’s exam (though none of you know my blog, haha).
"HEY IT'S HOLIDAY, why still talk about EXAM stuff???
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