Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Does it really take 2 months to grade scantron forms??

As my life thus far as a professional student, I have taken my fare share of multiple choice tests and would say that I am a decent test-taker. Yesterday consisted of 7 fun hours with #2 pencils answering question after question about children with fevers and other odd presenting symptoms that made no sense. This is otherwise known as the pediatric boards. I had done quite well on similar sort of tests of 200 questions at the beginning of each year of residency, all of which predicted that I would pass the boards (but didn't count for a hill of beans ...). As a result, my residency program director told me not to spend too much time studying. I'm glad that I didn't listen to him. The test was hard. However, I'm not sure more studying would necessarily have done any good. Some things you know and others you wouldn't regardless of what you study - minutiae that you never see in practice. So, I'll be waiting until mid-January to find out my score. They must have to do a lot of statistical analysis because 2.5 months to grade scantron forms seems a bit ridiculous.

1 comment:

yola said...

I'm sure you did fabulously, just like you always do! And yes, it does seem ridiculous that it should take that long to get results. Really it will probably sit in some filing cabinet for weeks and weeks until they finally run it through the machine and type up the letter that accompanies your results. See how cynical I am after working in an admin office all these years? :)