Last Friday was the last day of my surgical rotation and after 7 weeks, comes the End of Posting exam.

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For those of you who’re not familiar with the format of exam in Medical School, generally it can be divided into two large components; the theory part and the Clinical part.

The Theory part

As the name suggest, this is the part where the exam is mainly paper-based and at least in my faculty, we have the OBA (One Best Answer), the EMI (Extended Multiple Items) and KFQ (Key Featured Questions). The OBA is the trickiest with all 4 answers to each question (out of the 20 something questions) are correct and thus the winner is one who can find that one best answer

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The EMI is where they list you 4 to 6 sets of questions. Each set is starts with a list of 7 answers followed by 3 scenarios and questions. After reading the scenarios and questions, you’ll have to choose the answer from the aforementioned list of answers and these answers may be use more than once.

The KFQ is basically a modified essay question where the answers can either be long or short.

Generally, the problem with the theory part is time as some questions can be ridiculously long and the process of getting to that answer takes quite a while as well (And yes, we have calculations as well for those of you who assumed we can suck at maths) However, for most medical students including me, Theory is the easy part.

The Clinical Part

This is the real business, the part where balls will be shrunk.
Clinical part consists of long case exam, short case exam, Instruments, Imaging interpretations and tests interpretation. Long case exam is basically the simulation of what exactly happens when you receive a patient which includes the history taking as well as the physical examination. Short case exam is just the physical examination alone. When it comes to examining the patient, the thing we all fear the most is we accidentally cause pain to the patient which will immediately result in a fail.

What imaging interpretations essentially mean is that you can be given any x ray films of any part of the body, CT scan image, Brain scan, etc and must be able to interpret the pathology (what’s wrong with the imaging) if there is any. Failure to recognise all the pathology in the imaging results in immediate fail. Test interpretation is the hardest part as blood test alone has a lot of parameter, indices, and normal reference value which you must remember. Now, there hundreds of tests with samples from different body parts and body fluid.

That’s basically the brief summary of what the exam is like in Medical School and in all honesty, it’s very tough and more than intelligence, you need luck as well because you need all 3 parameters (The Lecturer, The patient and your knowledge) to be in-check.