Spring Forward

It is really nice outside today! Sixty-six degrees, sunny, not very windy at all. I had to drive to Walgreens to get some allergy relieving eye drops, and I put the top down, and it was heavenly. Unfortunately, I have to stay inside pretty much until I pass out from exhaustion because tomorrow is our final biochemistry exam. And I am failing biochemistry.

I kind of wish I could argue with someone about my specific case, so I will argue with you. Inarguably, I am doing poorly in only two classes: Anatomy and Biochemistry. For all my other classes, I got my act together, learned how to study, and am passing all of them. Except for Anatomy and Biochemistry. I've spent probably an hour looking over my test grades in both classes, figuring out the bare minimum I would need to get on the remaining exams to pass. And this is where life gets sad, because all my test grades in both classes fall into the C to B range... except for the first two in both classes. If I could retake the first two exams, after learning how to study properly, I probably wouldn't be freaking out so much right now. I'd probably eat dinner outside, enjoy the first truly wonderful day of Spring.

Actually, my above admission isn't entirely correct. For Anatomy, yes, all my grades after the first few were in the C or B range. In Biochemistry, I seemed to do really poorly only for one person's exam. He taught two, noncontinuous, portions of the class. When I averaged my grades based on who was teaching the material, I found that for one professor, my average was around 53%. Should I blame the professor? Probably not, but it's tempting when I present statistical evidence that I couldn't learn from that man.

So now I have to get a 97% tomorrow to pass the course. I've gotten 100% before, when I really needed to. I'm hoping that that will help ease my anxiety. I also know how to study finally, so that should help as well. But there's always a large chance that they're going to ask a question you didn't think would be important, or ask it in a way that is much too confusing. So no matter how well prepared I am going to feel--and I intend to feel really prepared, there's always that chance that I will get a 95% and that won't be good enough.

Meanwhile, in a hypothetical perfect grading system, I've come up with a more idyllic plan to promote learning: If a student should get below a 50% on an exam, something I've done about four to six times over the course of all the tests I've taken here, wouldn't it be better to have the student retake that exam? Or have them complete a take home exam? And then the score could be ameliorated to something, still failing, but more beneficial for the student's psyche, say a 60 or 65%. In this way, wouldn't you kind of be forcing the student to relearn the material? Yes, failing should be punished. We can't have our doctors being daft. But by just giving me a 38% on an exam, I have no motivation to ever relearn that material. Quite the opposite really, because I am now so traumatized by the anatomy of the lower extremity that I care nothing about it.

As much as I disagree that all of this information is important, some of it is, and I won't know which will be important until I'm actually out there, practicing medicine. So wouldn't it be better to have students look at material again, instead of consigning them to spend a nice day freaking out way too much about something that, in the end, might be impossible to actually achieve?