Whew!

It's over! I have survived the final ordeal of semester 1, known as The Exam, and I am free for 5 and a half weeks! Yipee! Now I have to do all the odd jobs I put off, citing the excuse "I'm writing essays", and later, "I'm revising".

The Exam was neither stupidly easy nor as tough as I pessimistically thought it might be. I'm pretty sure I passed, then again I know I haven't got 100% either. I cannot make a more accurate guess of my results than that. It was the usual mix of exam questions:

• The ones I had a strong feeling would be asked and I made sure I knew the subject well. This included the assessment of a chest x-ray for technique and quality - pretty standard stuff.


• The ones I had a strong feeling would be asked but I couldn't get the facts to permeate into my brain no matter how much I tried. Primarily this was the question asking for a description of the process of healing of a bone fracture - I don't know my osteoclasts from my osteoblasts.


• The ones that completely surprised me and required a fair amount of guesswork and waffle. The prime culprit here was the question that asked the wavelength ranges of certain parts of the electronmagnetic spectrum. We had had a lecture on this but I had assumed it was just taught as background for the future physics lectures, I hadn't bothered to learn all the wavelengths and frequencies. After all, why would a radiographer need to know the frequency of infrared light? At least I could remember what order they were in.


• And of course, all the stuff that I had learned inside out that wasn't in the exam, like the attenuation of radiation. I had no chance at all to prove that I knew that I_x = I₀e^-μx

The biggest trouble I have with exams is the actual writing itself. At the best of times my handwriting is messy and it has been all my life. Doing virtually all my writing on a PC nowadays has meant it has got worse. Under pressure, I tend to get letters the wrong way round, put capitals in the wrong place and the letters come out all different sizes. I have to assign myself a few minutes at the end of exams to correct any malformed letters. My hand also hurts when I hold a pen too long. Oh, and my grammer goes to pieces too. I pity the poor person who has to mark my exam.