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Path is a difficult course, very difficult. I'm in 5th/6th term, so i took path last term. I noticed a few things that might be helpful.
Two big reasons why it gives us so much trouble is 1) there is just a ton of information in a short period of time, and 2) most of us have never taken a pathology course before. Without having taken path before, it takes a while to know where/what/how to focus on the material. For example, before SGU I took a biochemistry course. Because I had biochem previously, I understood what biochem was all about before taking it in med school. I understood the big picture, and I knew the focus of a biochem course. Because of this, when i took biochem in med school I knew what to focus on. I could read the notes/textbook and understand "ok, this is important, that isn't, i should know this specific thing, not that one" etc. I could answer the question, "Ok, what is it that medical BIOCHEMISTRY wants me to know about this disease or that pathway?" For a given disease or physiological pathway, there is something distinct that biochem adds to its understanding. And by understanding the big picture of biochemistry and having experience with biochemistry, we can pick out the the significant points when reading the notes/text/lecture etc. Because the science of pathology is new to us, it is hard to do this...... thus everything seems significant. It is hard to know that this or that detail doesn't really add anything to our understanding of a given disease because the detail itself is new to us, the detail itself stands out to us. You want to know a given detail about a disease because it can help to seperate the disease from another, help you to identify the disease, help to define the disease, or help to manage the disease.... the detail is an aspect of the disease that stands out. But with the science of pathology itself being new and foreign to us, everything stands out, and we wind up trying to learn and memorize things that in the end are not significant, details that don't add anything to why a medical doctor would want to know about a given disease. That, itself, can create an overwhelming amount to information to master for an exam. And on top of that, at SGU we take a full pathology course in half the time..... so even more information to tackle. This brings me to my next point.....
STICK TO THE LECTURE NOTES, and GO TO CLASS. For each exam I approached the material in a different way. For one of the exams i decided not to go to lecture and just read and took notes from the robbins text that corresponded to the lecture notes. This created a problem because I ended up having just too much information to master for the exam. A strategy like this one was fine at times in the past with other courses, for reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph. But this didn't work well for that path exam. I did the best on a path exam, by far, when I went to all the lectures and minimized the information that I wanted to bring into the exam. I still read robbins, but just to give me an understanding of the material, and not for notes/details. I used the lecture notes as that source for notes/details to bring into the exam. We often hear professors tell us not to use too many study resources, and not to memorize everything in the text. This is so true for pathology. This doesn't mean that robbins, WEBPATH, practice USMLE questions are not helpful. They are helpful, but we need not memorize all the details. Many of them are not relevant. Stick to the lecture notes. I also realized that the histological descriptions in the lecture notes were worded very specifically, and that these phrases were the ones that were used on the exam. Memorize those descriptions, word for word. Going to lecture is important because the material is presented to you by people that understand the science of pathology, they have that understanding (the one I mentioned in the previous paragraph) that we do not have. And by hearing the material from their perspective, we can start to understand just what it is that a pathology course wants us to know about a given disease. In a sense, we can learn from their experience, and begin to understand what details are relevant, and which are not.
Concept maps. They are not for everyone, and they may not help you. However, the idea behind them comes up on the exam. One of the ideas behind the concept map is that it allows you to link concepts together that at first glance would not have been associated. The exams ask a lot of questions this way. In your lecture notes it will describe a disease, and tell you that these patients are also at risk for some other disease. You need to know what these are, and you need to know the pathology behind them. Immunosuppression/Immunocompromised and HIV/AIDS are classic examples that you will be tested on. The question stem will give a clinical scenario and you have to figure out that, ok, this guy has HIV. But they don't ask you about HIV, they ask you about the other diseases that HIV patients can get. By doing the concept maps or associating different disease processes when you study, you will already have these ideas in your paradigm of the disease.
Hope this helps.
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09-04-2008, 10:56 AM
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