My sister asked me yesterday if I was starting to feel nervous about my exam. I said "no, not too nervous yet but I do want to get through all of my Nigeria material before leaving Holland if I can". I was on chapter 17 of 30. (I've been reading a lot of text books since Nigeria, but decided 6 days ago to start revising power points & notes as a final revision. Until yesterday, progress was good. I think I needed a bit of a study break, which I took in the afternoon.)
Today, I feel differently. Why? I decided to look through some past exam questions. Bad move. I thought I'd look through a couple of questions and encourage myself that I know a lot of the answers.
Well, the first question was about the composition of breast milk versus cow's milk. I thought I'd nail it because I know breast milk has: less protein but of better quality, slightly more fat (but more is unsaturated), lower osmolality, more carbohydrates (mainly lactose), less vitamin D (need to supplement), better iron availability and lots of other good stuff like immunoglobulins.
Unfortunately WACP thinks I should know this in more detail and expects me to answer true or false to whether or not breast milk contains 4.2 g/100 ml of fat, has an osmolality of 400, has 60.0 kcal of energy etc. Ugh. Of course, I can't remember the exact figures at that point and am unsure of whether things are true or false! A quick glance at my flash card reveals the answers true, false (300), false (66.6). Why can't they stick to testing whether or not I understand concepts. Why focus so much on numbers??? Surely that's not any more helpful in medical practice, besides you can look it up if you need to.
For now, I will ignore the exam questions and continue to revise my Nigeria notes. Once I'm done I'll tackle past questions again, and hopefully I'll see that not all of the questions are so bad and I can answer a good percentage of them correctly. Time will tell.
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