We get negative points for therapeutics. 🙁 it's negative 10 points everytime you make a wrong therapeutic recommendation, so granted how we usually have about 10 patients cases per exam, you can potentially end up with a -100 points out of 100. How does that even work ?
Is our school the only school doing it ? I understand the rationale and logistic reasoning behind it ( so you dont kill patients irl) and I studied all my contraindications for the midterm, but I can't help but be anxious as I am awaiting my grades.
I don't like that for a few reasons.
1) Strategically, you're better off not doing anything than suggesting something that can cause harm (which mirrors the real world). But you're in school, you're there to learn stuff and I don't see how the faculty can comb through your reasoning on how you arrived to a specific answer (right or wrong) if you're going to err on the side of caution.
I think mistakes are instructive and, for exam/teaching purposes, negative points robs students of that experience.
Example: say i walk into exam for hypertension and dyslipidemia not knowing anything (got drunk the night before, wing it) about the former.
i confidently get through dyslipidemia and get to HTN, knowing i know nothing, i'm better off leaving it blank than making an attempt (apparently i'm smart enough to be strategic) which doesn't sound right to me (academically). There's too much incentive to be ultra conservative and/or omit things.
further, say you have a bad teacher for that subject, a spike of wrong answers can help guide teaching by alerting faculty to a pattern of weaknesses in the student body. if students are extremely conservative in their answering, that information is lost.
this kind of runs parallel to my logic on why extremely hard exams with a bell curve are more informative than easy exams where 90% of students get A's (it's impossible to tease out the weak from the strong).
