A Test on the Quest...

It was a rainy night on November 2nd, when I left my girlfriends apartment with a confident, "I'll be back in an hour!"  I got into her Prius and drove the dark, windy, back roads out to Comosun College's Interurban Campus to put my quest for knowledge to the test for the first time.   Before I left, I had searched the interwebs to determine which of the many buildings held the classroom wherein I would meet my fate. 

It is a funny thing how something looked at on a 2D computer screen, in the light of day, fails to translate well when attempting to use that knowledge to locate it's 3D counterpart on a dark, dank night.  And thus I found that while I had left the apartment with nary a butterfly circulating through my digestive system, I had seemingly ingested a flutter of them between point A and point B as my worries of arriving late grew.

After navigating the parking lot, running to the building, and following the signs within, to the door marked "Testing In Progress", I entered the room to find myself the centre of attention.  Twenty-five women's heads lifted from behind twenty-five computer screens and stared at me while I stood confused.  Why were there all these computers?  Where were the booklets, scantron sheets and HB pencils?  Was I late?  From the front of the class came a woman's voice, "You must be Nathaniel.  You are just in time.  Grab a seat behind one of the empty computers."  With a nervous smile to the other ladies I made my way to a lone computer at the back of the class.

On the computer terminal was a screen that had two options, Test A or Test B.  The instructor then preceded to explain that all the tests were now paperless.   This test was a 50 question, multiple choice quiz.  The questions were chosen at random from a bank of thousands of questions created by the Vancouver Island Health Authority.  She told us when we were done the test to raise our hand and she would come over and take down the result.  We could then leave.  With those instructions given she told us to kindly close our medical terminlogy textbooks and turn off our cell phones. 

I looked around and saw that the textbooks used by those that had taken the medical terminology course were about 2 inches thick.  "Oh oh", I thought to myself.  The instructor then told us that we would be doing Test A and that we could begin when were ready.  

The questions were pretty straightforward and yet it was more challenging than I had anticipated.  I breezed through the first block of five questions, but then came up against one that I had no clue on:

 AD refers to the:  a) Left Ear

                                  b) Right Ear

                                  c) Left Eye

                                  d) Right Eye

So I skipped it.  I mean all I needed to do was get 36 right so I wasn't worried.  I continued on and slowly became more and more concerned.  It seemed to me I was skipping more and more questions.  Not only that, some of the questions that I HAD answered I was beginning to second guess.  It wasn't all Carditis and Infarction.  The test covered a lot more than my minor introduction to medical terminology had prepared me for.  My initial belief that this would be a quick "in and out" rapidly faded as first one lady and then another raised their hands.  Those two women seemed to be a catalyst for the others as hand after hand shot up until there were but three of us left.  I read over my answers one last time, with trepidation pressed the "complete" button,  and hesitantly raised my hand.  As the instructor come over my results flashed onto the screen.  Turns out I had answered 37 of the questions correctly.  74%!!  I had passed!!!