Admissions tests: Quick and easy cash!

[Apologies for the lack of posts - busy with May Week, graduation, moving house, looking for a job...]

I’ve been looking at the admissions tests I need for applying to grad medicine. One that keeps cropping up is GAMSAT, particularly geared towards graduates. The issue here is that it’s particularly geared towards biology graduates. Despite the course websites stating that they accept “Sciences”, or even “Geology” as an appropriate first degree, one still has to pass GAMSAT, usually with an around 60% mark, which claims on the website that you’ll need first year biology and chemistry knowledge. Crap, I haven’t even done A2 biology (though I’m working on that now – it’s really rather interesting, but that’s beside the piont).

“So just do the test, if you fail then never mind, try again later”, I imagine you’re saying. There’s a slight catch to this – the test costs ~£160 plus VAT, and you have to buy past papers (well, the one mock paper available) pushing the cost up to around £200. This strikes me of being somewhat rediculous, that I could spend £200 on something that has a high chance of screwing over my plans of a future career.

The other admissions tests aren’t so bad, ranging from forty to sixty pounds. But still, this is a silly price to pay for something that chances are you won’t even get something positive out of. The problem is, I can’t “take a stand” and refuse to pay all that money – then I’ll have an even lower chance of getting in!

<soapbox> This system annoys the hell out of me. People who genuinely have a desire to do medicine are being rejected, and even put off applying, due to the financial implications of taking the admissions tests. As if graduate medicine isn’t already expensive enough, now you have to pay for the tests, as well as devote the time to learning the material which you could spend in employment so you can afford to work like crazy for the next four years of your life. Not even that – some admissions tests such as GAMSAT aren’t even designed to let the majority of people onto the course, those who haven’t already done a biology degree. This puts people like me who really want to do medicine [yeah, so it's all about me, not really indignation for the rest of society] at a disadvantage against others, like a few people at Caius I could name, who have done a biochemistry degree and are applying for grad medicine as “something to fill the time”. The test doesn’t measure your “dedication” to learning medicine, it unfairly discriminates against certain students who, according to the course websites, should be more than capable of handling the degree. </soapbox>

Ok, so other universities use the standard admissions tests (expecting A2 biology, chemisty and physics) and some don’t even want that, relying on your interview and undergraduate grades. IMO this is the fairest way to do it, and encourages people who want to do medicine to apply from all walks of life and from a level playing field – a graduate on any subject should be able to cope with A2 biology and chemistry [do I speak too soon?]

What is the solution? For me, I could spend another two hundred quid on a set of text books? Spend about the same on some intensive course? I really can’t afford that, money or time wise. If you can think of anything better, let me know! All I know, is someone somewhere is making an absolute fortune flogging these tests, and others are making piles of money selling their “guru schemes” and other daftly named textbooks for those with desperation and daddy’s credit card. And they’re going to keep making money, because people are going to keep taking the tests. Me included!

As a final note, I know the admissions test isn’t everything when it comes to getting on the course. But if I don’t do well enough on the exams, despite having spent ~£250 on tests this August, I won’t even get as far as them looking at my past grades, my experience, or inviting me to interview. God, this is a depressing thought.

S’all over

Yatta! Exams are over!

Exams

Sounding like a broken record, but I’m getting really stressed about exams this year. More so than any year previously. Stuff just doesn’t seem to be sticking in my head no matter how hard I try and make it do so, and there seems to be far too much to cover before they all kick off.

I’m not even sure why I’m doing them. What use are essays? It’s an exercise in how much you can remember. Apparently it’s to assess how we take in information from lecturers and papers, analyse it, and make coherent arguments out of it. But then, isn’t that the point of something like a literature review, where you can actually go and look things up and have time to put together a sensible argument? At no point in life are you ever going to have to put together a one hour essay discussing the evolution of the Himalaya or the method of producing orbitally tuned timescales without any kind of source mateiral to go on.

At least the practicals make more sense. You actually use your brain on new material, and have to thing. It actually assesses your abilities, not how much you can remember. But unfortunately they don’t count for as much as the essays.

Still almost over. Scarily soon they’ll have started, but at least then they’ll be over in a flash. Like a blood test, the waiting is the worst part.

Revision notes: SNR and errors?

As I write my summary notes of summary notes of summary notes of lecture notes (themselves a summary of what the lecturer was saying) in a vain attempt to make things stick in my brain, I’m left wondering how fundamental errors gained during the first lecture propagate through the notes.

Leaving aside errors in interpretation, there will almost certainly by errors in that facts and figures that I write down during the lecture vs what the lecturer said. There may even be errors in what he or she says, due to nerves/overthinking/speed. So what happens then? I make my first set of revision notes. These errors propagate on, and I’ll probably gain further errors. And again. And once more. So if we assume I make 5% errors in transcribing the previous work, then by now what I’m writing down is 25% errors (or might be – my maths is probably wrong. It’s a long time since I studied that kind of probability!).

On the other hand, the signal:noise ratio (or SNR) should hopefully be increasing – removing the waffle and keeping the salient points. If those 5% or errors were mostly in the blurb, then I might be removing errors with each successive pass. However that is unlikely – blurb is easy to copy, important details aren’t.

So is my scheme worth it? The stuff is slowly sticking in my head, but how useful is the material in there? I guess it all depends on whether the SNR increases faster than the %errors. Which perhaps suggests another way of revising – repeatedly making notes on the original lecture notes. That way you’re sampling the same data over and over again, and the error should diminish proportional to the square root of the number of “measurements”.

Or am I overdoing this work avoidance thing?

I Aten’t Dead

Just revising. Yeah, I’m actually working hard. It took four years to get the hang of, but the “shit, I really need to get a first if I want to do medicine” thought has kicked in and I’m even enjoying (some) of it!

[Where "hard" is defined as four hours a day of so. Damn my short attention span.]

To be honest, I just want them to start and be over with. If they were tomorrow then I wouldn’t have to spend the next two weeks trying to think of more and more things to revise, and panicking myself over the fact that two thirds of the course are brand new and have no past papers. Or real guidance as to question types.

Plus then the fun things to be looking forward too will be here quicker. Or perhaps not, that’ll only happen if the next two weeks disappear. But if they just shift the exams, well, I’ll have two extra weeks off prior to the fun things. These include Strawberry Fair, May Week, gradumacation, and getting a new bike (hurray!). Oh, and moving “home” and getting a job, not so fun.

Anyways, best get back to revision. But never fear – I’m still as grumpy and opinionated as always, so normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Disturbing Technology Inc

Now you too can experience the joys of having a child…

Sounds like an idea (not necessarily a good one, but the Japanese robot industry doesn’t appear to have the same definition of “good” as sane people do). At least until you watch the videos. If only the thing could do something other than flail its arms about and make “honk honk” noises it might be slightly less creepy :S

And in other news, only three days left. Then it is off to here for the weekend.

In theory…

Well, I’m glad that’s semi-over. All the theory papers finished yesterday (12hrs *cry*). In review – shit. The essay paper was a bit of a laugh, and only worth four percent. However I probably should have taken it a leeeetle more seriously than I did (maybe the Barney rant was a bit out of place) given how badly the rest of the exams went.

I won’t bore you with too many details, suffice to say that it could have been better. I think the main issue was that there was just too damn much to know – whenever I revised something new, other facts fell out of my brain. I knew that there was more to write, papers I could cite, but the details just weren’t in there. And as for climatology, which I didn’t understand to begin with…

Results come out a week on Wednesday, and there’s always the practical exams to come – perhaps I should be revising those instead of writing blog posts, but I’ll get round to that later. So there’s no point in worrying about what’s already happened.

Anyway, to celebrate having bagged 75% of my potential marks, myself and Ana headed on down to Strawberry Fair. Here we ran into lots of first aiders (I’m so glad we didn’t do it, the weather was far too nice), drank some crazy margarita sold by a very high gentleman who told me that “it contains all the fruit of the jungle, man”, painted Ana’s face (the queue was too long so I did it myself – pictures later), and got passively stoned just be sitting in the middle of a crowd of people to drink said margarita. Then it was on to Liz’s annual Garden Party, where we were plied with much cava and parsnip crisps, giggled at how her kids never seem to get any taller, and went through the post exam craziness and worry that always happens.

In other news, I bought myself an Xda Mini S just to reward myself for doing loadsaloads of revision (fat lot of use that did me). First impressions are that it is funky, however wouldn’t be worth the c.£300 it would have cost me new (yay for eBay!), and although it is a minor annoyance, the fact that it only minimises applications on pressing the “x” button rather than closing them is an annoyance none-the-less – when I close WMP I expect the song to stop playing!

Other exciting stuff? I’ve managed to lose weight by not doing anything but revision – not sure how that works, but I’m making a damned good attempt to put it back on by eating huge amounts of Haribo and apple pie. The house I’m living in next year has been moved into – though I still haven’t signed a contract And May Week is soon, which is something to look forward to.

Right, back to work…

Bad Juju

Exams start today. It seems unreal that they’re here so fast – I haven’t quite got into the panic that went with the last two years. I’m not sure if that is a good or a bad thing.

However, from getting up today, I’ve had a run of bad luck. My trusty coffee machine is refusing to work, and instead leaking water all over my phone (lucking not my nice new shiney one!) and stoppping the alarm on it going off. Now the internet won’t work (yes, I’m being a big geek and posting this via a shell session on pip) so I can’t get my morning dose of reading blogs and bumming around in my underwear (or even post a unicorn moment now you’ve got the image of me in my boxers typing this in your head).

Oh, and I left my exam entry form at mine. Somewhere. So I’m going to have to go and find it before exams start. I wonder if these are all signs?