In case you're wondering...

The exams are over. I'm not sure how I feel about them. They were hard, yes, but not as bad as the original exams.

I thought day 1 was hard but reasonable. I found that I knew (or thought I knew) the answers to more questions than before, and wasn't left to guess between 2 options as much as last time. I was feeling quite good that night, but the more I thought about it, the more unsure I was.

I'd spoken to a few other re-sitters after day 1, and they were freaking out. It made me feel a little bit better, but then I started to doubt myself.

So I was a bit nervous going into day 2. That exam was a bit better than the day 1 exam, so overall I should be feeling positive about it, but I'm certainly not celebrating yet.

My post-exam policy is not to discuss specific questions, or go home and look up answers. It's too stressful, and will only upset me. However I made an exception after day 1 - I checked the dermatomes because I was sure I'd stuffed up a gimme question. I was right. I'm so frustrated that I displayed classic KT exam behaviour - my first instinct was to choose the correct answer, and then I proceeded to talk myself out of it, and I chose another answer, which was wrong. Aaaaagh!

Oh - and after we were assured, nay promised, that there would be no repeat questions on the exam, what do you think we found? At least 5 questions were repeated from our Barrier. Not that many, but it's still incredibly unfair. For example, I was chatting with one of the guys from another clinical school afterwards, and he said, "That methotrexate question was repeated from the Barrier. I got it wrong before, but I knew the right answer this time."

We've decided to wait for the results, and submit an appeal if things go pear-shaped. Actually either way we have to say something - it's extremely dodgy to get a promise from the head of the Assessment Unit, and have that promise brazenly broken. Do I think it made a difference? Probably not. But is it right? No way.

Some of the questions were laughable, literally. There were a few questions where I chuckled to myself and thought, "When did we ever learn that?" And then I did "eeny, meeny, miny, moe".

None of us felt like celebrating after the exams finished. It was a bit depressing. But now I'm getting used to the fact that I'm on holidays. Yay! We get the results on Friday.

And I've got a good distraction - my sister had a baby yesterday! A gorgeous little boy - the first baby in our family. Here's a picture (about 5 hours old):