I'm not really sure what happened. It's kind of a blur now. I remember our teacher telling us right before handing out the tests that she looked at the test she was supposed to give us and decided she didn't like it so she wrote her own. I studied Pam's study guide, the online flashcards and online notes, took online tests and did online labeling exercises. These are the things I did last semester when I aced the tests. I also studied the chapter objectives given in the syllabus because that is what Dr. Murphy told us to focus on. In fact, my problem is that I studied too many things. I had no focus. So instead of learning a few things really well, I learned a lot of things sort of well. I was having a hard time focusing the entire week I studied. Things weren't sticking and I was starting to get stuff mixed up in my head. I'm not smart enough to memorize or understand an entire chapter (two chapters for the test). So when she said she wrote the test I didn't know what to expect.
Once I started the test I realized I was in trouble. Last semester I took each test in 10 minutes and spent 5 minutes double checking (and never changing a single answer). This time I spent probably 20 minutes taking the test and 10 minutes going over it and changing a couple of answers because I had completely misread the question. I even guessed on a few. Some of the questions came out of left field. There were things I don't remember ever seeing on any of the stuff I studied and some things I remember just glossing over in lecture but there it was on the test. I found that several remarkably complicated subjects that we were told specifically by Dr. Murphy to know were completely absent from the test. These were things I spent time studying at the expense of other, more obscure things that I did find on the test. (Some examples, there was a question about the vagus nerve speeding up or slowing down the heart. I couldn't remember if the vagus nerve was sympathetic or parasympathetic. That was from last semester. So I guessed wrong. I looked back and couldn't find a reference to the vagus nerve in the chapter objectives, Pam's study guide or class power point slides. Why was this on the test? If it is important, why wasn't it emphasized in class or the text? We were told to know the clotting factors for extrinsic and intrinsic clotting. That was really complicated to learn. They were not on there. I learned the plasma proteins and their function. She only asked what organ produced them. I don't understand how that is more important.)
I haven't seen the test yet to really figure out what went wrong. I just know I got 108 out of 120 and there were no bonus points. That's a 90%, a B. Looking back I know I could have studied harder, but there was no way I could have known what to study short of memorizing the entire chapter (and I would love to do that). There were just enough obscure questions to throw my grade to a B. What really frustrates me is that my friends, the 4, are really smart. They all got A's last semester. They all got B's on this test. I saw how they studied and worked each week. They deserved A's. Their grades do not reflect what they really learned. And they need A's in this class to get into the school of nursing this fall. Something just isn't right here. I don't know what else to say.
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