HELP-3rd yr BHAM uni exams, depression :<

**GSoroz2008** · 17-05-2008, 06:50 AM

Hi All,

I am in need of urgent advice. My fried is in his 3rd year at brum uni and he has re-sits in CLS and IMS. He has failed and has to re-sit in about 2 weeks. Both of the exams are MCQ.

He has always followed a method of parrot fashion revision; and he has failed one year and had to resit it. If he messes up again he is in deep deep trouble.

For anyone who has sat these exams what can he do? he tries to revise all the lecture notes [i.e. memorise them] but gets confused between terms as they're very similar.

He is always insistent on trying to do parrot fashion revision but then has not MCQ practice. I have told him to do lots of MCQ questions;but he says that these questions are year 5 level so finds them too difficult. Given that he has his CLS and IMS exams from the 27th May, 28th May can ppl advise please?

He is struggling on his therapeutics within IMS, and infections within CLS.

Please please advise, his has lost all confidence and i fear this could tip him into severe depression. Family support is minimal as his parents feel he is stressing them.

In addition, he says that there are no exam papers to practice with. what MCQ practice do ppl advise? As an indicator he is taking 40 mins to parrot fashion revise lectures and to to 3 hours on the technical areas. He is literally doing parrot fashion revision. please help, i really fear for him.

**Petal** · 17-05-2008, 09:06 PM

Hi!
I’m a fourth year at Birmingham and I found Crash Course Pathology was really useful for CLS because it has got practice MCQs in the back and some of them are quite similar to the ones used in the exam. I used Clinical Chemistry by William J Marshall for the clinical chemistry. The case studies in that are quite useful. I can’t really remember what I used for infections but I think it was a combination of lecture notes and one of the text books they recommended. (Sorry I can’t remember the name of it.)
Our IMS exam was really random and you could have been the best student and still struggled with it. To revise for it I went through all my lecture notes from the two hospitals I’d been at and tried to cover all the topics listed in IMS handbook. For any topics that I didn’t have notes on or wasn’t really very clear on I found a general textbook. Medicine at a Glance and Surgery at a Glance are both good books as they summarise the topics quite well.
I revised most of therapeutics from the lecture notes with occasional references to the BNF and Pharmacology by Rang, Dale and Ritter. Therapeutics is one that most people find hard.
Hope all this helps. It just really a case of trying to remember as many key facts as possible and although the lecture notes are useful they don’t always have enough in them. I see what your friend means about the MCQ books a lot of them are aimed a finalists and it can be scary when you look at them. Lots of textbooks have practice questions in them and they might be a bit more relevant than the MCQ books.

Hope all goes well for your friend.

Petal

**GSoroz2008** · 20-05-2008, 02:56 AM

thanks petal for ur advice. i find it hard to believe that there are no past mcq papers available?!is that the case

**Petal** · 20-05-2008, 07:06 PM

There aren't many past paper questions available. Think it is because they have a bank of questions and so some of the questions get repeated. We got sent a few example ones with answers for IMS which were quite useful so if your friend has a copy of those then they’re a good way to check his revision. I’ve still got the ones from last year and could forward them if that would be any help but I imagine they might be the same as the example questions sent out this year.

Petal

**GSoroz2008** · 21-05-2008, 05:46 PM

Hi Petal,

If you could fwd the examples i would appreciate it, as far as i know he has said they got jack diddly squat! He is more confident now, but given he has two exams he is still a bit worried. His exams are from next tuesday.

GSoroz2008