I did my exam last weekend, got the results this morning. 95/100, which sounds good until you know that it was an open book test – so I got 5 things wrong, EVEN WITH MY TEXTBOOK IN FRONT OF ME!!!!
I shall try to remain positive and good humoured, despite the large amounts of snot leaking from my face.
Count: 685
Average: 84.2
Median: 87.7
Maximum: 100.0
Minimum: 11.0
Standard Deviation: 13.22
Disco Knitter 
Woot! No still sounds good 🙂 Open book tests are hard because when the book is right there you doubt yourself and keep thinking “I’ll just look it up and make sure”
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I think it’s a very good mark even with the “open book”. Congratulations.
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Okay, you. An exam, even an open book exam, is a very stressful and pressured situation. When I sat exams I often found that my thoughts didn’t flow in a calm logical manner, they’d jump about as I tried to bear in mind bits of info I knew I needed to put down at some point.
In the first year of my degree, I FAILED a very simple (not open book but we were allowed some specific reference info) exam. When I resat a substitute exam I got a 99 and my prof took me aside and said how stunned he was that I had failed first time as beforehand I was sitting on an HD. The point was, on the day of the original exam I just couldn’t get my thoughts in order and lay them out in the way I needed to. I still ended up with an overall HD for the subject, it was just a blip.
Lots of academics think exams are a pile. They are not a good measure of a student’s overall understanding of a topic and ability to apply that understanding, they are a good measure of a student’s ability to regurgitate info. Even in an open book you have to find all the bits you are looking for and a paragraph you might find in a second outside an exam might take you a few minutes to find in a flustered exam state.
My exam results had no bearing on how good a clinician I was when I did my pracs or started work.
Cut yourself some slack, okay?
xxx
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You are so hard on yourself Lara! If you’d failed it with the book in front of you I can understand you chastising yourself. With everything you’ve been through lately and given that this was a new skill for you to learn, I think you should be patting yourself on the back, not smacking yourself on the bum! 🙂
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You’re right, of course M-H, but I really feel the pressure to do well so I can get into the post grad courses. Massively prematurely of course 😉
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