GAMSAT sat

The building must have trembled and a gust of air blown open the doors as 1800 aspiring medical students threw down their pens and exhaled heavily with relief. As one of those dreamers envisioning themselves with stethoscope around their neck doling out life saving advice I must say the exam wasn't as bad everyone makes it out to be. Such famous last words bound to send a ripple through the cosmos, causing a change in my result from a pass to a fail. But even then I would have to maintain that it wasn't too bad. For an ESL speaker I can see that the humanities section* would have been a complete nightmare, having to fumble around with concepts and words that are vague and abstract - much like I felt for many of the science questions.

Having done over 500 practice questions in preparation I was confident with humanities section, neither confident nor in fear of the essay section, and apprehensive about the science section. Fortunately for most of the questions it is possible to use common sense with some limited background knowledge to figure out answers - the tight time frame meant that the more background knowledge you had, the less common sense and calculations from first principles was required. There were probably only a handful of questions where I was forced to consider the probabilities of B's versus C's (or A's and D's). I usually went with C in that case. By the end of the day I felt like I had learnt something interesting from all the questions, engaged in a challenge with a vague atmosphere of camaraderie and competitiveness, and wasn't too exhausted. In fact, compared to a day in the office it was a lovely day out.

Since then I've been delighted to see the health reform bill pass in the United States (I'm now opening myself up to death threats). I heard a Republican (anti-reform of course) saying "the US has one of the best performing health systems in the world".

WHAT??!!!!

It would be a miracle to find a single statistic that supports such a blatant lie. The only way it isn't a straight-faced lie is if the man is unaware of a world outside of US borders - or thinks that the goal of health care is to reduce quality of life. One can only hope that when people see the benefits of this small step in the right direction the flood gates will open for a wave of socialist reform.

I'm kidding. Or am I?

*Exam in 3 parts:
1. 100 minutes - 75 multiple choice questions on literature and humanities comprehension
2. 60 minutes - 2 essays responding to two sets of five quotes.
3. 170 minutes - 110 science (biol, chem, physics) questions.