Question about testing in med school...

[tugbug]

I should probably know this... but I dont. What is the testing like in med school, and how variable is it from school to school? What I mean is... My undergrad experience was pretty much in class tests over specific materials with M/C or short essay questions with a few papers and projects thrown in. However, in grad school its all projects and writing. Most of the tests are take home large/broad essay types that end up being 15-20 pgs, and we have papers to write every other day (yea, not really, but it seems like it). Anyway, just wondering what to expect in med school... heres hoping its the former... cause Im no writer.

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[Samoa]

With 100-150 students in a class, what kind of test would YOU want to grade, if you were the instructor and had no teaching assistant?

 

[flaming_gypsy]

i'm currently an undergrad, but at the med school here, the testing is every eight weeks with a solid week for exams. during that week the students have two days for problem based tests where they diagnose, interpret, and treat a patient with a condition, making sure to ask for certain tests, exclude diseases, etc. they also have an 8 hour knowledge based exam that is (i think) all multiple choice but very hard and full of obscure details. that one sounds like a lot of fun to me. the other day i saw a friend of mine working on his, and he was wandering around the halls thinking about answers, so it's not like you're stuck in a room with a hundred other people for 8 hours. then there's the interview/history part where all the med students schedule an "interview" with an md who plays a patient, and you must take a history and do all that nonsense.

apparently just about everyone prefers this sort of schedule as opposed to traditional biweekly exams or however other med schools test people.

 

[JM.]

med school test = hours of multiple choice hell on excruciatingly miniscule bits of medical trivia. Seriously. 50 questions of all the following are true except and all the following are false except gets to a person. Then if you're lucky you get to take the shelf exam, a 125 question behemoth that you are given 2 1/2 hours to complete.

on a lighter note, my friends at Drexel in the PIL program have the oppurtunity to mix up test taking by throwing in essays and free-response. Our anatomy tests had free-response sections, which more often than not, screwed me over.

 

[tugbug]

Thanks for the responses. Bring on the multiple choice tests... Not that I like taking monster M/C on minute details... I am just so painfully slow at medium to large writing projects that I might never get to sleep in med school if that was the testing style. Come on August... Let me at em.

 

[auster]

At Pitt we have 60-70 question multiple choice tests, one every couple of weeks. We don't have the "hell week" type test setup where you have multiple tests in one week, since we only take one hard class at a time - I am SO glad I don't have finals!