This is coming from a pre med. I was wondering what the exams were like in Med school. Are they cumulative? How many do you usually have a month?
Specifically are they more memorization or application questions?
Thanks.
This will probably get moved to pre-allo, but anyway:
Exams are tending towards a slightly more applied nature than they are rote regurgitation of facts, pathways, etc. That's not to say you don't have both -- you certainly do.
Speaking for my program, most exams are not cumulative. The ones that are/were had only a portion of questions represented by material from the last exam, so they're essentially weighted in favor of the "new stuff." Varies by school.
Exams at most medical schools I've seen discussed here on SDN are generally held every three weeks, give or take one.
For your laboratory practicals (think gross anatomy), questions are often tertiary in nature. For example, say you've got an uncovered forearm within a cadaver tank in the lab during the practical, with the muscles visible. What you might expect to see is several differently-colored pins in several different structures, each of which is unique. And say you've got a blue pin in a compartment of the extensor retinaculum (a band of connective tissue "strapping" the tendons for the muscles on the back of your arm/wrist/hand). A fair question might be "What is the specific innervation to the muscle which passes through this structure at this point?" or, a little bit further, even "What are the spinal segments providing for the *major* nerve which innervates the muscle passing through this structure?"
Your thought process might go like this:
"Well, okay. There's a pin in the extensor retinaculum compartment, which means it's an extensor of the hand. Extensors are innervated by the radial nerve, which is spinal segments C5-T1 -- so that's simple enough. I can see the entire dorsal surface of the forearm and the tendons of all the other muscles, and counting over from the thumb, this is the last one -- so it must be #6. And because I spent all night studying upper extremity anatomy, I know that the extensor carpi ulnaris m. exclusively traverses that compartment. And that muscle is innervated by the posterior interosseus nerve, a branch of the radial nerve."
Questions generally do not get harder than that -- and frequently, you'll get easier questions. But that's some idea.
Oh, and yeah, you'll also get applied questions (e.g., "if this nerve is lesioned, what clinical deficits would result?").
