"Why Flunking Exams is Actually a Good Thing" - NY Times

[DocToBe2018]

http://goo.gl/8E7ohs

Does this apply to med school pre-clinical education? Comments?

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[DermViser]

No, it doesn't.

 

[PhillyMed777]

Here's something better than failing exams: Acing every exam.

 

[mimelim]

None of you guys read the article.

I mean its silly, but hey,maybe its true. Not sure how pretests are crazy...

 

[sinombre]

None of you guys read the article.

I mean its silly, but hey,maybe its true. Not sure how pretests are crazy...

I didn't, but only because I assumed failing this thread would be a good thing.

 

[DermViser]

None of you guys read the article.

I mean its silly, but hey,maybe its true. Not sure how pretests are crazy...

Actually I did. It's silly, hence why I said it doesn't apply. Why not just give old exams?

 

[Awared]

At least the initial "hard part" of medical school is finding what is actually relevant to exams/future knowledge as a physician out of the 100 or so slides presented daily. A pretest that shows exactly what material we should get out of lectures kind of flies in the face of faculty who like to present minutiae as stuff we actually need to know.

 

[sinombre]

At least the initial "hard part" of medical school is finding what is actually relevant to exams/future knowledge as a physician out of the 100 or so slides presented daily. A pretest that shows exactly what material we should get out of lectures kind of flies in the face of faculty who like to present minutiae as stuff we actually need to know.

I think the harder part is realizing that everything presented is fair game and then learning how to study all of it. And then by next year the 100+ slides per day turn into 100+ slides per lecture. In retrospect, just about everything I thought was "minutiae" in ms1 turned out not to be.

 

[Psai]

More like why doing practice questions is a good thing. Flunking exams is not

 

[el_duderino]

I'm all of one theme in, but this would have been totally useless for me for biochem/genetics. The questions would have all been basically written in another language. Wouldn't have given me a sense of anything. There's just too much information.

 

[chronicidal]

I'm all of one theme in, but this would have been totally useless for me for biochem/genetics. The questions would have all been basically written in another language. Wouldn't have given me a sense of anything. There's just too much information.

The article notes that pretesting is most useful when the terms are vaguely familiar. It's most useful when you think you could make an educated guess but have to struggle really hard to figure out why.