Exam #1 (part 1): Over!

Ok, so I've been slacking on the posts, but hey, I've been very studious for the past 6 days in preparation for my first big exam. Today was the first part of our examination. It was anatomy in the dissected specimens. I was a little nervous before entering the room but still confident with the amount of knowledge my sponge-like brain had absorbed over the past 6 days and of course the last 5 weeks as well. When we got into the room, there were two sections with 15 tables each. We chose whatever table we wanted to start at, so I chose the skull (seemed easy enough to start with). Of course when you start with something easy, it makes you feel that much more confident going into the next question. I had to label the structures on the skull and I did that with no problem. The next station, was of the canine mouth and I had to identify which tooth was the carnassial and why it is a problematic tooth when extracting (easy!). The next was a question about the stifle joint (my specialty!), and I was asked to label all of the ligaments and structures around the joint. This was also a tricky question because you had to figure out which side was lateral and medial just by looking at a cranial/caudal drawing of the stifle joint. So you had to know that the fibula was on the lateral portion because of the lateral malleolus. After that question there was a wet specimen of the thorax and abdomen with structures to be identified. Then there was a picture of a histological slide of tissue and we had to identify what type of cells and epithelium were labeled. There were some questions on facial muscles and salivary glands. The questions that were the most difficult of the practical were the embryology questions. There was a picture of an embryo with the structures and early kidney structures that we had to label. I remembered the names for the most part, but identifying them was another story. I probably scored half of the marks on that question and the next embryology question was about the early heart, which was somewhat easy until you got to the part where it asked "What do the aortic arches function to do in the fish?". In the fish? Honestly? God forbid if non of us pass this exam because we did not know what the aortic arches did in the fish! Almost everyone I know had trouble on the embryology questions.

What was really amusing during the exam was the alarm that sounded to notify us that we needed to move on to the next station. We had 5 minutes at each station and at the end of those 5 minutes, this alarm sounded and it sounded like a military alarm or something that warned us of an atomic bomb or something. Quite amusing. There were a couple of stations set up that when you arrived at them, you had a free 5 minutes to rethink over some questions (which I felt to be quite helpful). So, now I am home and preparing to study for the next part of the examination, the short question/essay portion. Should be fun! I hope there is a question on torn cranial cruciate ligaments! Hope everyone is doing well and I will post tomorrow regarding part 2 of the exam.