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A List of Sorts

I the life of most of us profs who teach Anatomy & Physiology, there are two points in the semester that have the workload increase exponentially. One time is at the midterm, and the other is the week prior to final exam week. Well, this past week has been midterm.

What is it that makes the week so hectic? It is not really about traditonal written exams. I learned long ago to not schedule these sorts of exams during this week for with the other form of exam I am going to tell you about I would go insane. Additionally, it is this week that most other non-A&P profs schedule exams, so it is too much to expect of students in my opinion to have both a lecture and a laboratory examination from me.

That is what makes this week so heavy in terms of work load, however, the laboratory practical examination. For those of you who have not experienced a university level laboratory practical examination, it is a rather stressful experience for the undergraduate science student. In my case, this class is in human anatomy and physiology. The exam consists of 100 different questions that are scattered through 25 different stations in the laboratory. Each station has between three and six questions at it..... and these questions are related to various bones, muscles, brains, eyes, hearts, lungs, etc that I can pin numbers into, tape numbers onto, or simply ask about in some other way. The examination is timed and students receive 1.5 minutes per station. Every 1.5 minutes, students must move en masse to a new position in the room to view the next station's questions. The exam takes roughly 50 minutes total and when students have made their way around the room once, they are done with the exam. Their test booklet consists of two pieces of paper stapled together with 100 numbered, blank lines upon it in which they must WRITE out each and every answer for this exam. No multiple choice, no word lists, nothing but their MEMORY.

This exam is obviously very taxing on the students. On average by this time of the semester, the students have been exposed to roughly 750 different scientific names (usually originating in Latin or Greek) they are expected to know. The following listsa few examples from the 750+ they are responsible for at this halfway mark of midterm:

fovea centralis (in the eye)
infundibulum (in the ovary and also betwen the hypotalamus and pituitary)
acetabulum (at the junction of the illieum, ishium, and pubis in the coxal bone group)
sternocleidomastoid (a muscle in the neck)
fovea capitus (on the femur)
corpus callosum (a ridge seperating the midbrain from the cerebrum)
obicularis oris (circular muscles around the mouth and lips)

Students do not receive enough time to debate or hem-and-haw about the answers. In order to do well, they must truly KNOW the parts of the human body completely.

Setting up an exam such as this is very tough as well. It typically takes me roughly 5 hours to set up the exam each time during the start of the week. Usually it takes about 2 hours to put everything away, but this has to be done a few times a week as other courses need the space for other times during the week as well.

Students can react explosivelyl as well. Over the years, I have had students who begin to cry hysterically, students faint, and others walk out in a huff part way through. While in total there have only been a handful of these sorts, their buffoonery is what keeps me feeling sane in comparison.

To show you another measure of how arduous this task is... my pipe consumption has dropped to less than one third of its typical during this week. This additional testing proceedure is enormous when you consideer I have to have maintain the remainder of my normal teaching load, my research, and my committee service as well.

I am bushed, but now that the week is done, I do not want to go to bed yet. I am savoring fully saturating my soul with back-to-back-to back bowls of various leaves in my pipe.

But at the same time, my head is heavy and my eyes are drooping fast.

Goodnight.

PipeTobacco