From the first day of classes I’ve worried about a week like this. I think I’ve mentioned I’m only taking three of the prereqs I need to apply to PA school. That’s not a horribly heavy load, but this week everything came to a head at once.

• Monday – Anatomy & Physiology I Exam
• Tuesday – Bio I Exam
• Wednesday – Bio Prelab due and Bio Lab Quiz
• Saturday – General Psych Exam Due
• Sunday – General Psych Paper Due

Literally the only thing that’s NOT happening this week is my A&P lab quiz on bones and their facets and attachments points and more. I suppose I should be grateful for small favors.

And to make things worse, none of my study group for A&P was available this weekend.

Now fortunately, the General Psych paper can be submitted for review early, so I knocked that out Saturday morning and got feedback by Sunday night. So I’ll upload that shortly. And the General Psych test is online and available starting tomorrow night, so I can put off studying for that a bit and take it at my convenience.

And finally, the Bio Prelab is almost literally cut and paste and can be submitted on-line. So that’s been knocked out.

But the A&P I and Bio I exams: those made me nervous. Fortunately they’re mostly multiple choice, with the Bio exam having some essay questions.

I’ve always been a decent test taker, but I have to admit, multiple choice does make things easier. In fact, one of the topics we covered in General Psych last week is memory and how recognition is “easier” than recall. i.e. it’s a bit easier to see 4 possible answers to a question and recognize the right one than to be simply asked the question and have to recall the information and write it down.

That said, for me, one thing I often like to do when taking a multiple choice test is see if I can think of the right answer before I actually see the choices, i.e. make use of recall to reinforce my recognition. This gives me more confidence when I eventually choose my final answer.

And if you add to this the fact that there are actually skills one can learn when taking multiple choice tests, such as recognizing distractors, knowing certain answers are simply wrong and sometimes being able to think through to the right answer.

This came into play on question on yesterday’s test. I went back and checked all my answers before handing in the Scantron (yes, they still use them!) and had marked a few for “definitely look at” and one I wasn’t 100% sure on. But I was able to rule out two answers of the 4 and was down to two answers. I had initially checked one of them, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized the other was the right one.

So, one test down, another in an hour and then on to the rest. Wish me luck.