What is Expected Again?

A pop quiz set a lot of people off yesterday. Our pathology teacher, Dr. Rouhani, has decided our class is not his favorite. During the previous quarter, there were a handful of students who cheated on exams and plagiarized sources from the internet and included them in their papers. He reluctantly passed these students. Now he's teaching our second semester of pathology and the same handful of students are doing it again. I am not completely sure about the cheating aspect but I know there is some disrespect issues going both ways. To get even, if you want to call it that, he lectured yesterday for an hour then announced we were going to have a quiz. Everyone was beat by then because we had a dermatology exam earlier and spent the weekend trying to prepare for it. This pop quiz didn't go over very well with anybody.

As I was reading through the questions, I learned very quickly I didn't know hardly anything he was asking because I haven't been focusing on the material. I did my best and turned it in. Afterwards, I started getting pissed. Mainly because we are taking 37 credits this quarter and every instructor to this point has been very transparent as to when any quizzes and exams are. They understand the extreme pressure we are under and do their best to let us know when we must "perform".

To this point, we've covered an enormous amount of pathologies in the path course. Giving us no heads up was a power play on his part because he knew this is the only way to get our attention. If he doesn't announce the quizzes, we'll stay affluent with the course material.

In a way I think it was quite sophisticated but in another, I feel the move was pathetic. It motivated me to study the hell out of pathology today even though my exam in there isn't until 2 weeks from now. Regardless, sometimes life isn't fair. We have chosen a path in life that requires spontaneous performances like these and being that the real world isn't as linear as we'd like, it is a good and hard lesson to learn now rather than later in the clinic when we expect everything to be straight from a textbook.

All for now