Ulog Day 2: We Offered Aid To 3rd Year Medical Students Sitting For Their First Professional Exam.

winningman (45)in #ulog • 6 years ago

My day was a very hectic one. In fact, my entire week has been. I spent greater part of it assisting our juniors in medical school who are preparing to write their 1st professional exam. This is exam is popularly known as 2nd MBBS here.

Described by one of our lecturers as "the most difficult exam"; the consternation and public attraction caused by the result of this exam whenever it's released coupled with the consequence of not passing it can make one go beserk. The students are first subjected to an intensive 18 months tutoring. At the expiration of the 18 months, they'll sit for the exam.

The 2nd MBBS programme comprises 3 courses - biochemistry, anatomy and physiology. On a normal, each of the 3 courses is studied for a duration of 4 years but here, they crash them in 18 months and expect the students to be able to remember and reproduce them. Also, it is not conducted semester by semester like other conventional exams. Everything is written at once and the questions can come from anywhere. It has 4 parts - essay, mcq/objective, practicals and viva voce/oral interview. The marks are unequally allotted to the parts all totalling 70. The remaining 30 marks are left for the continuous assessments which comprises series of tests written within the 18 months duration. The consequence of not passing the exam is that the student will have to withdraw from studying medicine. It is always a day filled with untold agony and tears whenever the result is released.

So, this year I and my friends decided to conduct tutorial sessions on the practical part of the exam for them.

The exercise started on Saturday with histology studies. What's done here is that they study the microscopic features of some tissues and organs in the body. Then they will be asked to identify what tissue is presented before them. After that, they may be asked one or more questions from the tissue they identified. We exposed them to the tissues, taught them how to answer the accompanying questions and also what questions to expect.

On Tuesday, we taught them how to identify the human bones and the various things that make up each bone plus attachments - muscles, nerves, blood vessels, etc. We also taught them how to interprete radiographic images.

Below is the skull and humerus - some of the bones we tutored them on.

On Wednesday, we came back for soft tissues. Soft tissues refer to the organs inside the human body. We tried to cover almost all the popular ones they bring out in the exam viz: The brain, heart, kidney, lungs, pelvis, upper limb, lower limb, spleen and models(moulded images used for teaching and learning). We shared the students in groups and we(the tutors) rotate from one group to another. The exercise continued until we went round all the groups. It was indeed tiring. It's one of those few occasions I had to stand and talk for over 4 hours. But then it was worth it. The feeling of gratefulness that emanated from the eyes of the people we taught were rewarding.

The liver

Today was the final day. We set a mock exam to test them against the main exam on Tuesday. We toughened the questions a bit and reduced the time so as to ensure they don't find the main exam more difficult. The idea is to make them to prepare very well for the exam. With the level of commitment we put in and also with the level of dedication I saw in them, I am optimistic their results will be better than the previous years.

Students writing the mock