You're adults now so you're expected to write essays questions

I never understood these types of questions being given to science students. Short questions, like in the leaving cert, where you're expected to write approximately three sentences for an answer are the best way to actually test a student's knowledge. Now maybe that's not always what you're testing.

I think long essay style questions allow a students to act like they're experts when they're not. The other thing is that it's often not too hard to know what's coming up in the exam anyway. So there's little incentive to actually comprehend to subject matter, and students end up memorising fancy statements with big words, and what not. I'm not saying that that's an easy game either, but it's the way most students tackle it. In a way it was often fun constructing answers that would give the impression I knew what I was talking about, considering that I didn't! But it's a way of saying to the student "memorise everything you've heard about X and write it down".

To me these seemed more like English exam with the way students often have 45 mins to an hours to write about one question. I never felt it was very appropriate to examine science students this way... to even the students who are doing the course for the right reason, it must seem bizarre. I'm taking a guess also that this style of exam suit females better than males. Now if there was a leaving cert style exam, most students would be absolutely fcuked. Imagine how many short questions you could fit into 45 minutes! Also, considering first year students often do almost all MCQs, essay style questions is a jump to the opposite extreme.

Regarding my own bioscience course, the problem with I had was that I couldn't motivate myself to learn things unless my aim was to really understand it. So I spent a lot of time, with difficulty, trying to actually conceptualise much molecular biology. It was only in doing so that I often realised how it was actually the lecturers so poorly explained such concepts, or that would mumble the most important bit. I then properly understood why the lecturer was often me with silence from the crowd.

I feared that I'd find it difficult to get through third and fourth year without a good grounding in molecular biology. It took me a long time to realise, and it was kind of sad to find out, that I was able to get through third and fourth year while dealing with lab strategies underpinned by without really properly understanding the molecular biology that these strategies were underpinned by. Well actually, maybe I did understand a lot of it. But I always forgot it, and it was exhausting having to over it and figure it out again. Interestingly, for my class's final year project presentations, they all gave quite good presentations. But guess what, when it came to the questions they weren't too good. I think I was the only student who had it the other way around... a poor presentation but brilliant at answering questions.

The other funny thing is that a lot of these students, who have seemingly no interest, will attend all the lectures. To me it's madness to attend more than 70% of the lectures. In my undergrad there was always a question on the first lecture. And if there's two professors for the module who'll give 8-9 lectures each, then (on hindsight) I could've actually survived by only attending the first lecture from each professor. It was always a case of students attending to too little, or too much.

By the time it came to my masters it was all about compiling statistics from other people's studies, using big words in presentations and re-wording lots of online garbage for my case studies so that it wouldn't look like I was plagarising. For the presentations the lecturers weren't interested in asking someone could they explain the basics of PCR or a basic question on DNA replication. And it's just as well, because I'd have looked like a fool. And so would most of the others. It was interesting watching lecturers and students interact while the lecturer would be oblivious to the fact that the student wouldn't understand the underlying science!

During the MSc I learned nothing about the actual science itself. And that always felt like a shame. It was always the case that by the time I became interested in, or began to understand any task, was the point in time that I was already over the 40% mark, and therefore it was the time to give my time to something more important.