settling into revision mode

Hello,

After several days delay, I did manage to finish off my collection. In fact, I think the break made a nice change - writing three essays in a row always makes my hand ache! The final two questions were just the ones I was hoping for. Which was a shame because now they're not going to come up in the real exam!

We didn't have a paper 2 (synoptic) mock but I have a tutorial on Wednesday to work on that one, which I've been writing essay plans for. It's a tricky paper to revise for because we haven't had anything like that before and it involves more thinking than just splurging out rote-learned notes onto the page. A lot of the questions aren't much different from the paper 1 essays, which makes it difficult to include the broad scope of information that is necessary. And there are very few practise questions available at the moment because the new course was only introduced lsat year. My tutor has promised to make some up if necessary though so we won't be short of work!

I met up with the second year medics in my college yesterday because they are choosing projects at the moment and eager for any advice or inside knowledge on supervisors. The supervisor I had is offering another project this year so I've had a few emails from other second years asking about him too. It's a nice easy term for second years at the moment, after doing their exams at the end of last term, and they all seem to be excited about starting their projects in the second half of term. Most of us third years seem to have enjoyed our projects, and one or two have even decided to carry on with research instead of going to clinical school. The vivas are all over now and most went well, although a few people have been unlucky with unfriendly examiners and a particularly unfortunate friend had a projector, laser pen and electronic timer that didn't work in hers!

viva and collections

Hi,

I had my project viva today - a 5 min presentation and then 10 min of questioning by a couple of examiners. It went pretty well - the questions they asked were all directly relevent to my project and therefore not to hard to answer since I've been researching and working on it for nearly a year.

My paper 3 (critical analysis) collection on Friday was also ok - I ran out of time a bit but the whole point of the collection was to work out how long the questions take so that's not a problem. I'll get the results for that tomorrow and I'm hoping to do another practice paper 3 each week until the exams, which will give plenty of chances to perfect the timing. The complexity of the article we're given to analyse makes all the difference on how hard that paper is.

The paper 1 collection I had on Saturday wasn't so useful becuase my tutor left out half the question paper by mistake so I could only answer one question. I'm going to do the rest of it tomorrow morning!

Now that the viva is over I just have revision to do. As well as meeting a tutor to get collection results back tomorrow I'm also seeing another one to arrange paper 2 (synoptic) revision tutorials as revising for that paper is more difficult and different to anything we've done before.

Hello again!

Hello,
I arrived back in Oxford yesterday. Sunday was the beginning of "Oth week" when most people usually come back but because of Easter people are coming back at various times this week up to Thursday, when we have to be in Oxford. I have a practise for my project presentation on Thursday with my tutors and collections (college start-of-term exams) on Friday and Saturday but nothing before then. Yesterday I just moved my stuff in and unpacked and caught up with friends, and today I've been doing a bit of revision in the library, which is already pretty busy.

My finals are in 5th week (5 weeks from now), and I'll have 3 exams. One of them is a synoptic paper, which I have some teaching in this term (I don't have a timetable yet so I'm not exactly sure what, but from last year's timetable it looks like a few lectures in the first two weeks of term). So most of the term seems to be free for revision, which shouldn't be too bad compared to last year, when the volume of work was much greater and the pass mark much higher, and we only had 2 weeks to revise. After finals, I have a week off and then a 3 week clinical anatomy course, which consists of very full days of dissection room, living anatomy (poking each other), computer-assisted learning(CAL) and lecture teaching, with exams at the end of each week. I've even had forms for my GP placement in October to fill in, but for now its just the finals that need thinking about, with collections as a little practice on the way.