Being On the Other Side (Part 2)

My job teaching the second year anatomy labs included taking part in the oral examination at the end on topography, which is using external landmarks to identify the location of structures that you can't see. That basically means, if you point anywhere on a dog, I should be able to tell you exactly what is there and what it does. I made a post about it when I had to go through this--it's the first oral exam of the degree!

They use the third year students as scribes. So the professor asks the questions, and the scribe copies down what the student says, so there's some sort of record. This concept was terrifying as an examinee: some older and more knowledgable student hiding in the corner of the room, watching you silently and making notes.

If I had known what it was like behind the scenes, I doubt I would have been so nervous.

For one thing, there is NO space to write. Every student gets one line on the sheet, and each question gets a box (four or five questions each). So I had to condense 2-3 minutes of nervous speed-talking into a box the size of my thumbnail. Well, I guess the details aren't so important after all.

The examiner I was paired with was the other ridiculous factor. He's well known as a ridiculous professor (not in a good way), rather lackadaisical. He was completely relaxed and probably a bit bored, since he had to examine student after student all day long, which was an interesting contrast to the complete terror of the poor second years coming into the room. By the end of the afternoon, he was yawning and joking about beer, as some poor sould who'd been waiting tensely for the entire morning stares at him, pale and waiting for it to all be over. Their minds blanked, they stuttered and misspoke, some went really fast, some had massive pauses. But frankly, most of them were 4/5 or above on every question. The lowest person still scored an overall 70% or so.

What really amazed me was that Prof Lackadaisical wasn't really paying attention. Most of them, the grading process pretty much consisted of the student leaving the room, and he turns to me and says "Yeah, she was fine, 5/5 for everything." As the afternoon stretched on, however, I had to point out things like "Well she DID call this thing this totally-other-thing" and he'd be all "Oh. 4/5 then." Eventually we got to him turning to me and asking "How was that one? Was she right?" and I became the sole arbiter of their grades. So, really, they had nothing to worry about, because it depended on both me and him remembering what the person said, and all the details falling through the cracks in the floor because I had only written like 10% of what they said in the first place. Well, that, and the fact that they all had studied and knew what they were talking about.