Midterm Stuff

Hey humans.

The midterm is coming up this next week! I’m sure you’re all stoked.

The midterm will consist of 14 slide questions, 4 U-find questions and 2 we-find questions, all worth ½ a point. So the midterm will be worth 10 points, just like the rest of the quizzes, so you can drop it. 

We-find questions are something new that we’ll only do during the midterm and the final: we will have a microscope (one per we-find question) set up in the back or side of the classroom, pointing to something in the slide you will need to identify. There will be a question associated with each of the we-finds just like on the slide questions (name this structure histologically, name one secretion from this cell, name this organ anatomically, etc.). The slide label will be covered up, and you may NOT move around in the slide or zoom in/out. You may adjust the focus if you need.

Another important note: you will be taking the midterm on your own laptop. So don’t forget to BRING one, make sure it’s charged, adjust your settings so it doesn’t shut down halfway through the test. Just before we start the midterm, we will give you a URL to a page on which the midterm will be made temporarily available. Once everyone has gone to the page, clicked on the midterm and is viewing it in full-screen, we will make the midterm unavailable once again. So do not exit out of the midterm once you’re in. We administer the midterm this way so everyone can take the test at his/her own pace, and to spread the U-find questions out a little so you don’t have to wait forever for us to check them. Once you are finished with the midterm, have a TA watch you exit out of it.  

As far as studying goes, there really isn’t anything that you’ve learned so far that isn’t fair game for the midterm. So study everything! Make sure to go back through and study the stains commonly used, development (24, 48 and 72 hour chick slides) etc. The hardest part of the midterm is often just figuring out where the heck in the body you are, and the best way to do that is study identifying landmarks for each of the organs you’ve learned (what makes each organ unique – thymus vs. liver, spleen vs. lymph node, hyaline cartilage vs. fibrocartilage …).  If you come to a bewildering slide question and your brain is blank, look for the most noticeable characteristics of whatever it is you’re looking at and go through a process of elimination in order to figure out where we are (“There’s a circular shape of a different color than everything else, what organs have that? Spleen, pancreas, thymus, lymphatic nodules…”). Once you’ve figured out what organ you’re in, think about what structures we’ve learned in that organ and attack the question.

Another study tip is to look at as many pictures as you can, so you can get a feel for what things look like from different orientations and with different stains. For example, as you’re studying the small intestine, google “small intestine histology,” select pictures and name everything you can on the picture (if you look at a duodenum slide, you can name brunner’s glands, Paneth cells, simple columnar epithelium with a striated border, goblet cells and lamina propria) and everything you know about everything you see (secretions of glands, histological and anatomical names, embryonic germ layer origins, etc.). We also show lots of slides to students who come to our open hours, so if you haven’t gone yet, start now!

Feel free to contact your TA’s with any further questions. You guys will rock it!