Oh and just to backpedal a bit, by the way I passed all of the techniques of the Ocular Health Procedures (OHP) final proficiency with flying colors! I practiced almost every night, average 2-3 hours per night for 1.5 weeks prior to the proficiency and all those hours of hard work paid off!! Unfortunately nearly half of my class failed at least one technique, with BIO contributing the highest failure rate (about 1/3 of the class failed it). I wasn't kidding about how BIO is one of the toughest techniques to learn!!! Oh, and I never mentioned the seriousness of failing a part of the proficiency. Failing is getting <75%, which is below 15 out of 20 points - if you fail, you have to retake the part(s) you failed (and you keep your original grade). If you fail the retake, you have to take the ENTIRE course again (BOTH the lab and lecture). Failing the lab is pretty bad, but failing the course is a horrible thing because the final was a BEAST of an exam!!! See below for more details...
Here is a summary of my finals week:
- Clinical Analysis: this final was pretty tough, but overall I think it was the easiest of the finals I took.
- Binocular Vision and Sensory Perception: this was tied with OHP with being one of the two hardest finals I took in finals week. There were 75 multiple choice questions with five problem solving problems. It was scheduled for three hours on the final schedule (and I was like "there's no way it will take three hours!"). BUT IT WAS THREE VERY PAINFUL HOURS LONG!!! Oh man, that was so bad...my butt was numb at the end!!! Not to mention, it was just as painful to study for because of the massive amounts of material this class involved. And to make things worse, whoever set up the finals schedule made OHP the next day...!!!
- OHP I: This one was ridiculously long as well (2.5 hours) and I already anticipated that it would take that long because again, of all the information we needed to know for this class. The biggest part of this final involved Visual Fields, where we learned how to locate a lesion along the visual pathway based on what part of a person's visual field is missing, whether it is in the eye all the way back to the cortex. There was a lot of complicated concepts in this class and boy did it show with the average score of our class (75%, which is pretty bad considering our class consistently scores a mean of 85-90% in most of our classes).
- Pharmacology I: all I can say is I'm glad I didn't go to Pharmacy School!!! We learned about probably well over 200+ drugs (and that's probably an underestimation). Yes, we had to know bizarre names like Levofloxacin, Montelukast, and probably the worst one to pronounce is Thiazolidinediones (huh???). It was as if we were learning an entirely new language (well in a way, it pretty much is a new language!).
- Ophthalmic Optics III: this final was tough in a sense that there was a lot of information that could be interpreted in different ways, not to mention it was on the same day as the Pharm final, so that really sucked.
- Cornea and Contact Lens I: this final had tons of information, but what made it tough were two main factors: (1) the numerous kinds of calculations we had to know regarding how to prescribe a rigid contact lens, and (2) it was the last final and we are all really tired after five finals!!!
That's my finals week for you...now it's finally vacation time!!! We have one week for spring break and we'll be back to the grind once again the following Monday, off to face another tough quarter, one that is supposedly harder than this one (!!!). Alright, until next time, I'll keep you all posted so stay tuned!