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Academic

Reach out for the star

Muhammad Shoyab

There might be a medical college across your street; you might be able to enter through its gates and even the doors. Getting to sit at the desks, however, is a difficult business. This article is for those A-Level students and graduates who are thinking of studying medicine in Bangladesh. It is specially for the juniors from my school who say they keep on trying and are never able to reach me, and have either started thinking that I am annoyed by their questions or am finally able to realize just how much medical school can take away from a student's life the latter being the wiser assumption. It can also help you finally decide how ready you are to pledge yourself to memorizing tons of information, not getting to eat or sleep properly for weeks altogether and still not being able to satisfy the professor who would say, "Young man, I understand that you have read books, but you did not comprehend!"

Before You Look
The popular saying asks you to look before you leap, but there are things you need to do before you can afford to even "look" at medical schools. Before you can reach out for the star or the moon, you need to stand on high ground. The minimum requirements are C's, but to start from a competitive position, you should have A's in Biology, Physics and Chemistry at A-Level, in addition to 6 A's at O-Level including these three subjects. Eligibility for medical admission is determined on a scale of 200 marks, of which 40 marks are for O-Level results (best six), 60 for A-Level results (Biology, Physics and Chemistry) and another 100 marks for an MCQ admission test. The admission test is highly competitive or rather eliminative, as it is designed pick about 1700 students from more than 20000 - all of them of the same caliber. Keep in mind that there were about 34000 A+'s in SSC last year, and more than 7000 A+'s in the HSC examinations. This means that almost all of the 1700 students who would ultimately make it to medical school will have A+ in both SSC and HSC, i.e. they will sit for the admission test having already scored 100 out of the 100 marks reserved for general education. To put yourself at par with these people, you must make sure that you also have 100 out of the 100 for general education results. I am assuming that those who are reading this have good grades at O-Level (i.e. at least 6 A's including Biology, Physics and Chemistry), so I would only remind you of the paramount importance of ensuring A's in A-Level Physics, Biology and Chemistry. Since 60 marks are reserved for three A-Level subjects, you should understand that each of these subjects carries 20 marks. An A gets you 20 all right, but a B scores not 19 but 16. So dropping one grade causes you to lose 4 marks, whereas differences in medical admission are often made on the basis of 0.1 marks.

Getting Started
Just as you have studied hard and secured good grades and are thinking that you can recline on a couch, close your eyes and dream of medical school, I have a bad news for you you need to learn your subjects all over again! This is because the syllabus for the admission test is the HSC syllabus, which is bulkier and has to be studied in a way different from what you have acquainted yourself with at A-Levels. The difference lies in the fact that our entire education system is still based on the primitive concept of memorizing, which you would better adapt to at this point. In addition, half of HSC biology is botany and much of the other half (zoology) involves rats, guinea pigs, earthworms, etc, which are not taught at A-Level. Physics and chemistry have more chapters and each chapter has greater content than at A-Levels.

The admission test takes place on some Friday in November. This means that those of you who would finish A-Levels in June would have to hurry while those who finish in January would have some time, but not a lot of it. You would have to digest the same volume of information in a few months that is meant to be immersed in over two years. Therefore, get going as soon as your exams are over. Try to strike a partnership with an HSC cousin or neighbour who is also an MCAT candidate; make them your guru for a while and learn from them how to select which things to memorize. If they are reluctant towards studies, it is in your interest that you should make more attentive and sincere. Again, developing such a joint venture pattern of studies would help you in the long run, as you would need it in medical school.

The Language Problem
English medium students and their parents are, by tradition, worried about the difference in language. However, actually this is a very small problem that can be and has to be overcome. First, the HSC books are all written in Bangla and the admission test questions are asked right from these books. Hence, there is no alternative to knowing what these books say. Fortunately, these books write the technical terms in English alongside the Bangla synonyms, so if you are comfortable with general Bangla (haven't you had Bangla at O-Level?), you should not have any problem in reading these books. If you are not, you will have to collect the books for students who study HSC in English. One such classmate told me that they had a few books written in English by their teachers, and had to make up the rest from lecture sheets provided by teachers and from their own translations of the Bangla books. You can collect the books and lecture sheets from English-HSC students or from the English sections of medical admission coaching centres. However, this would be painstaking and time-consuming, so go for it only if you feel you are too weak in Bangla. Furthermore, this will not solve the problem fully, because the English in these books / lecture sheets is quite different from the British English in your A-Level books. Translations cannot fully preserve the theme represented in the original writing.
In addition, most of the teachers and students at medical school have a Bangla medium background, so lectures are mostly delivered in Bangla (although the books, lecture sheets and examinations are in English). This means that you would need to develop your Bangla listening and speaking skills, and you would rarely have a patient who would tell you their complaints in English or would prefer to consult a doctor who does not understand or speak Bangla properly. For the admission test, you can choose between English and Bangla as the language of the question paper. In fact, the paper is first set out in Bangla and is then translated to English. I had chosen the Bangla question, because both the examiner and I would understand it equally, while English would differ between the translator and me. However, the difference is perhaps not too bad, as I was the only English medium student who chose the Bangla question paper, but not the only one who got admitted.

Coaching Centres
To learn the art of memorizing and to know which things to memorize, it is almost obligatory for A-Level graduates to go to a medical admission coaching centre. However, coaching centres do not actually teach they simply take you through a revision schedule and give practice tests. You should put yourself in the driving seat and take what they provide as a guideline only. You should identify the gap between your A-Level understanding and their HSC expectations and take their help in overcoming those drawbacks.

Several coaching centres have now opened separate sections for English medium students. I do not have a very clear idea about it, but what I understand is that they try to deliver lectures, lecture sheets and tests in English. However, as I said earlier, language is too small a problem and the gap between the A-Level and HSC way of studying remains on you to be bridged. In addition, you cannot find your HSC guru in the English section of the centre. However, the Banglish environment of the English section is closer to that of medical school than the Bangla environment of the standard sections, and you can find other English medium people whose background and attitude are similar to yours, making your stay at the centre more enjoyable and comfortable. Therefore, the choice of section is yours. However, I have something to say about the choice of centre. The number of coaching centres has increased tremendously over the past couple of years. Each centre, naturally, has its pros and cons. Equally naturally, the management of the centre and their student agents (beware!) who pose as "senior brothers offering advice" would speak to you only about discounts, freebies, AC rooms and prizes.

They would show you their prospectuses claiming that 90% of last year's admissions were from their centre (an utter lie by any centre). Be intelligent enough to ignore their baits and find out whether they offer what YOU need. Also, do not rely on the fame of a centre. Any place of learning is little more than the collective goodness of its teachers, so when you evaluate a centre, look at its teachers, not its name or its past batch of students.

Ensure that the centre has a fixed group of (not more than five) teachers who have experience in medical admission coaching. It sounds nice when centres offer "the help of more than a hundred medical students", but it hurts to discover the truth of the saying "too many cooks spoil the broth". Remember that the "centre" cannot help you you need a living human, or a few of them, who know about the system, about you, and would have a responsibility towards you. Remember that, for any purpose, we seek the help of a few experts and not of many amateurs. Try to be placed with the better students, those who take medical admission as a dream and not as a backup.

Take Aim
Most coaching centres give a memory test on the very first day, to discover how much you remember and to give you an insight into what you are to prepare yourself for. Having secured the 100 marks of general education, you need to know the minimum you need in the MCQ to remain in the race. Ask to see the results notification(s) of the previous year(s) and look at the pattern of marks obtained by students who were selected for admission. (Coaching centres do collect and preserve copies of the notifications, question papers, etc, so do not be deterred by their reluctance.) For example, the students who were selected for Dhaka Medical College in 2004 had obtained more than 170; in 2005, it was around 178 and this year they have scored 187 and above. Thus, know how much you need to get and how far you are from your target (compare with your memory test result) and get to work.

Plan Of Study
The admission test asks questions from Biology, Chemistry, Physics, English grammar and General Knowledge. Practice general knowledge and English from past MCAT papers. For the science subjects, you would mainly need the HSC books and MCAT papers. Chapter wise / subject wise tests given by coaching centres are an important addition, so do not hesitate to collect and preserve them, old or new, along with their answer keys. Other than books, you will come across lecture sheets and guides. Your strategy would be to use a few highly efficient tools and discard the other somewhat helpful stuff. Before beginning each chapter, go through the MCAT and coaching questions on that chapter and try to answer them. Avoid guesswork here as you are trying to draw a line between your abilities and your shortcomings, not to score. Check your answers against the key. Since you have answered only those questions about which you were 100 percent confident, wrong answers mean that you are totally blank on those topics or have failed to understand the question. Look for explanations of the questions and answers in The Royal Guide. Having thus developed a basic idea of the requirements of each chapter and your flaws in it, read the chapter from the book and make sure you are now able to answer all the questions correctly. Do not try to digest the entire chapter from the book only learn as much as needed to answer the questions in front of you, because you will have to learn every chapter this way, anew! To ensure that you do not miss anything, have as many question papers as possible. Do not be tired of questions that are repeated answer them as many times as you face them, and make yourself absolutely at ease with such star questions. All of this is, as it sounds, a lot of work so do not waste time.

Lecture Sheets & Guides:
Once you have made yourself familiar and comfortable with books and question papers, take a glance at the lecture sheets provided by your centre (do not run after another centre's sheets if you think that their sheets and teachers are too good, switch over). If you feel that particular sheets help you answer certain questions more easily than books, add them to your arsenal, otherwise throw them away. Of the guidebooks your centre provides, look only at the MCQs (again, do not buy any other guide most are worthless). Do have a copy of The Royal Guide, however. This is a mammoth collection of MCQs from the last 10 years' (or more) MCATs and those prepared for coaching just what you are looking for. The uniqueness of the book lies in the fact that it explains each question and each choice and then takes you on a journey of explanation and derivation to the correct answer, leaving no gap between your understanding and the answer. The book arranges its contents in as many ways you would want to study chapter wise, subject wise and year wise, thus sparing you the trouble of hunting MCAT papers for questions on a particular topic. In my opinion, this is a must have.

Format Of The Mcq:
Most of us are familiar with the "one best answer" type of MCQ, but medical schools all over the world follow the "answer all options" type. Here, the student has to answer each choice as true or false, and marks are awarded against each. Leaving an option blank does not gain or lose you any mark. In the admission test, candidates are required to complete the circles against the true options and leave the false ones no option can thus be left unanswered. 1 mark is awarded for filling all the true circles and leaving all the false options of a particular question stem there is no fractional marking. Thus, there can be questions where your answer will be ABCD (all true) and others where you will not fill any circle (all false). There is no negative marking either.

Sit Tight
From the completion of A-Levels to the MCAT is a long, difficult and anxious journey the first of its kind in our lives. At its crossroads, life seems to have never been so miserable, the world never so cruel. One does not know what to call himself a student, but of what? Parents look up to your face everyday, and friends inquire at every meeting to know your vision of the future. Despite the golden grades under your belt, you feel helpless, and do not know the answer. Like the journey of life itself, this journey is full of vicissitudes. However, know that the light at the end of the tunnel will finally shine on whoever remains firm, resolute and can continue for a few more months the same hard work that they have been doing for years. While it is true that admission tests are challengingly different from certificate examinations and you have the greater trouble of a hitherto unacquainted syllabus, it is also true that the condition is the same with everyone else, and many have treaded the same path before you. If those before you could do it, if those around you can do it, you can also do it. This is how life is full of obstacles. Think of the barriers that you have overcome. Think of how impossible they had once seemed, and how you now feel that you never realized when you have triumphed over them. The questions of life have only one answer, as expressed in my personal favourite inspirational quote, "There are extraordinary men and there are extraordinary women, and there are extraordinary moments for them to treasure, but there is nothing more extraordinary than THEIR hard work and perseverance." Go at it, be at it, and hold your breath. Good luck!

(Sir Salimullah Medical College
Daily Star Awardee 2001& 2003)