NPLEX Randomness.

Awesome joke, Nora!

I wrote my NPLEX Basic Sciences exam yesterday. Phew, glad that's over.

The joke pictured above was created by my classmate and pretty much sums up how we all feel about the exam.  All that studying I did in July?  I'm not sure if it all paid off (thankfully I learned a lot this Summer, but did it help me ace NPLEX, probably not because it was such a random exam).  Was it was I expected? Not at all. Like I said, it was quite random.

NPLEX was one of the silliest exams I have ever written.  I am shocked at how ridiculous the question choices were.  When you only have 200 questions to evaluate how knowledgeable a future doctor is within the realm of basic sciences, you think you'd test them on X, Y, and Z, and leave by the wayside those minor less-relevant-to-a-doctor details.  Seriously, with only 200 questions you decide to ask about that? There were several questions evaluating my understanding of high school-level Biology (odd), lots of questions regarding the shapes of bacteria (hmm, don't know how often in my clinic I'll be observing bacteria under a microscope... I'm guessing not very often), and many concepts were repeated on the exam (you already asked four questions about the kidney, and now you want to ask me four more!). I don't know, but I feel like I would have divided up the 200 questions a bit better.  You know, feature more pathologies and test more medically-relevant concepts.

Anywho, enough complaining.  Hope I don't sound like a sore loser or anything, because that wasn't the goal of this post. In fact, I think I prepared super-well for the exam (well, as much as you can prepare for a random exam like NPLEX, ha ha). I'm very proud of my effort overall, regardless of what the NPLEX examiners say*  :)

*Note: exam results aren't published until about October, so I won't know what they'll 'say' for a long while.