Sure. So like you said, you'll be on the quarter system, and there are 9 graded quarters. If you look at the schedule on that link, which is for 603 (your third quarter of first year), every individual course you see on there has it's own lecture time, but all material falls on the same tests. You will have a midterm and a final for each quarter (plus quizzes, assignments, clicker points, dissection points when applicable), and on the midterm and final, there are questions from all of your subjects. The midterm is ~4 weeks into the quarter, the final is ~8 weeks in (the last week). The two ungraded quarters are your first/second year clinics quarters.
There was a cumulative final at the end of first year (and second year, I think?) which was terrifying. Midterms and finals were typically on Fridays, and you would be sitting through new lectures up to the Wednesday of that week.
Studying for the tests isn't all that different, except maybe a bit more of a marathon than other schools. When you have individual tests for each class, the tendency is to study for that particular test in the days/week leading up to that test (or tests, because in vet school you'll often have multiple tests each week). Not saying that's ideal, but it's realistic. With the mega courses, you have to be a bit more diligent in the timeline because there's much more to study per test. You can't sit back for 3 weeks and study for everything in a few days leading up to the test, unless you're the type that can spend very little prep time and still do well. You also will need to spend time in the anatomy lab outside of scheduled dissection time during first year. You do get a 'reading day' the day prior to each midterm/final which is a lecture-free day intended for studying. In first year, your anatomy lab practicals are part of your midterm/finals. The class was broken up into three groups - group one would start in anatomy (for 45min I think?) and then rotate into the classroom to start the computer based exam, and then the second group would rotate out of that room into the anatomy lab, and so forth.
It can be harder to pick out what's important to know for the mega-course testing imo. Idk who is teaching these days and if the testing has changed accordingly, but there will probably always be the questions that you have no recollection of covering, and then when reviewing the lecture, you'll see that the answer was in a caption of some random picture in the lecture slides lol. It's difficult to effectively study for a test that might cover something like 80-100 lectures/test plus anatomy lab when clinicians are still wanting to ask you questions on very minute details.
I was c/o 2019, so there could absolutely be changes, but this info should be generally accurate still. Also, looking at that schedule again, I have no idea what 'organology' is referring to.
@spiane? Is it just more anatomy lab time?
It has been 10 years since my first year so I'm definitely starting to forget the day to day.
Did we get two reading days for the finals? @battie and
@SkiOtter for input too.
ETA: I pulled up a really old post of mine that talks more about how the grading works:
"A mega course is basically when you have one grade for: Histo, anatomy, physio, radiology, neuro combined. We don't have several exams each semester (well, quarter for us). We have 2: a midterm and a final. Each midterm and final covers ALL of the subjects we have lectures on. So basically, you can bomb anatomy and ace histo, but you won't see what grades you got in each individual subject on your transcript. You'd just see one single grade for all of those courses you take that quarter. As a result, getting a 2.0 (C) in a mega course is different than getting a C in
each subject, if that makes sense. For perspective, I got A's or B's in everything but anatomy, but anatomy is weighted so heavily that it pulled me down to a high C in every quarter but one.
The grading...well it's not a huge deal. We don't give 0.5's. It's either a 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0."
And now that I've pulled up this post, I'm assuming 'organology' is histo because I forgot that was a thing.
Our histo lab was all computer-based, we had to download a super annoying software program 
. It's normal histo, the path stuff comes in second year.
