u/PuzzleheadedDay8877

me and my partner are going on 3 years, he’s a 2nd year med student and is highly interested in derm. we live together

he struggles with the low match rates and i would personally say he probably struggles with a lot of anxiety. as you can imagine, for a second year student going into derm (lowest match rates this year) he is very stressed. he is a part of dozens of research project, volunteers multiple times a week, is pres/copres/on the board for upwards of 12 DIFFERENT SIGS. we are attending derm conferences often to present research, and he is constantly stressed about if mentors and leaders like him or not because derm is so network based (i’m sure they do, he’s a very likable guy).
if i didn’t know him personally, his profile is stereotypical gunner.

but omg he struggles so hard to manage his anxiety and stress that i can see when im talking to him his mind wandering away. i make dinner and he watches youtube while eating because he says it calms his nerves, or he listens to me talk about my day, but if i ask about his he shuts down from stress.
i feel like sometimes im right there with my baby but sometimes i am just living alone, even though he’s at home all day while im at work (his classes are optional attendance) i come home to a semi-messy house and an absent minded partner, where i then pick up the pieces from his day and make dinner, and then i go to sleep to then go to work the next day (i work a 9-5)

i am not in hell, this is ok but like i do not want to live like this forever.

i just want to hear that it gets better and what down the line looks like, because he’s only just starting year 2. i can manage for now but i just need some hope for what the future will be 🙏

Hello!

I am a senior university student and finishing up my last classes.
I am quite the lurker on this subreddit, but have never posted, so please let me know if I am breaking any of the rules.

One specific class this quarter has been an absolute gem. The professor is quite understanding and genuinely cares about his students. Although he can be quite strict about attendance and assignment due dates, he never makes the assignments difficult. It is a very busy work psychology type of class.

The final was just recently, and my classmates and I are dumbfounded.

50ish of my classmates and I worked together for days, breaking down every topic. All of us only recognized about half of the questions on the final.

After the final, a few of us spent the time recalling questions and looking for where these topics were mentioned in class, because we felt absolutely shocked at how little we knew. We actually went through every single lecture transcript and could not find a single mention of a topic that made up 3 questions out of the 50-question final. We went through the textbook, and could not find one single mention of it either. This is just one example; multiple questions were, honestly, unfair.

For an example question that feels the simplest to explain, this is a class that is very application-heavy and clinically focused. One of the questions was "What year was the DSM first written? 1952, 1962, 1972, 1982." While this may seem like an "oh, well you should have studied that" type of question, this was not mentioned a single time in any lecture (we went through every one of the 20 transcripts). When we eventually found it being mentioned, it was in one line of the textbook. Of an almost 1000-page textbook. We have done over 100+ assignments in the course about the brain, diagnosis, applications, etc., etc., and it felt like an absolute cop-out of a question, and there were many more that felt similar.

In the study guide he provided us, it listed about ~6 major facets to focus on. One of them is biology. We wrote pages and pages of notes, noting important neurotransmitters, drugs, their impacts, and understanding how different variations in the brain can impact diagnosis, TBIs, and did dozens of practice problems. Essentially, we practiced things we had learned in lectures and in the textbook related to the content of the course, as we should do. On the final, there was only one question on biology, and the question was, again, never mentioned in any of the lectures NOR the textbook. There was not one biology question on any of the content we talked about in the past ~20 lectures!

Many of us have taken the professor before for a related course, and the final average was around 80%. I would personally say his exams are quite easy, and with this professor last quarter I got a 98% on the final.
However, the grades came out for the final this quarter, and the average was a 57%. To have over a 1/4 of your class working together, actively studying and really understanding the topics, practicing vignettes and doing mock differential diagnosis, and then for the average to come out to be a 57% is shocking to me.

Anyway, I am getting worked up because I worked hard and have not felt so dumb taking an exam that I really worked for since high school.

I wanted to ask professors, at what point is it okay to go to a professor and talk about an exam's unfairness? I feel it goes against all moral codes I have built my entire college career, as I am very much a "professors are always right" kind of person (I am an undergrad TA for another course, so I get it). But I am seriously dumbfounded.

TLDR: A lot of the questions on a class final were just "gotchas" and were about content that was not mentioned a single time in lecture or in the textbook. It felt like the professor told ChatGPT the name of the class and then asked for it to create a 50-question MCQ final.

What is appropriate here? Do I go to his office hours and ask? I am not confrontational, and I am still passing the course with an acceptable grade, but I feel cheated cause it could have been better.