After a good 7 hours, I've finally finished marking the first batch of my medic's practical exams. And I'm not-so-proud to announce that if a third of them pass, it'll be a miracle! It's SO depressing when you mark and realise that all those hours that you spent typing up notes, preparing lectures, giving lectures, preparing practicals and supervising practicals were all for naught. Nothing has sunken in...
It's quite amazing how little understanding of the world they have! For example, my friend Athena, who has not studied biology at all and considers her knowledge of biology limited, appears to have a better grasp of the anatomy of a rat than the average medical student who dissected the wretched creatures for a whole THREE WEEKS!!!
What also leaves me completely speechless is there inability to perform relatively simplistic and straight-forward tasks, like read the instructions on their exam paper. The number of students that completely ignore the instructions and write what they feel the question should be asking is scary to say the least.
Prime example: One of the questions asked them to plot a line graph of a set of mass-specific metabolic rates (basically how much energy used for every gram of body mass in a given time) against their corresponding mass values. What do I get?
A million graphs of mass-specific metabolic rate plotted against species, or mass against species!!! Every possible combination except the one they were ASKED for!!!
(In case you were wondering, I'm a little frustrated and despairing at the moment. I think I'll go home and it'll all be okay in the morning...)
I think marking the papers made you delusional in the idea that everything will be fine tomorrow :P I have an uncle and a close friend that are rapidly losing their hair trying to teach their students. You are not alone...you should form a world wide support group :)
ReplyDeleteI had a mentor session with some students a few weeks back and quickly identified (from looking at their previous tests) that the biggest problem they suffer from is an inability to answer the question. We even did an exercise where we try to figure out the question a student is answering based on the students answer. They were soooo far off!
ReplyDelete(these are 2nd year students too)