The Critical Essay Exam

In the preparation for the essay exam, I received quite a lot of advice. In retrospect most of it was useless.

The actual instructions for passing the essay exam were quite general, amounting almost entirely to “‘In essay form, critically discuss this statement from different points of view and provide your conclusion”, so it is perhaps unsurprising that other forces would come to fill that void.

There was an online lecture about structuring an argument, which many people seemed to find useful, as it was indeed provided by the college doing the marking. It outlined the basic anatomy of how one might write one. Introduction, the definitions. Three paragraphs, each with one idea and ‘for and against’ within them. Then finally a conclusion.

There was also a lecture about ‘finding themes’ which I rather struggled to wrap my head around.

I also had a lot of input from my previous consultant about writing to a metric. In short, he was a strong advocate for memorising a certain set of points that seem to come up on the marking key and then making sure that these points were hit almost regardless of what the topic at hand was. The mnemonic he gave me was something along the lines of “ICREAM HITS”, though it was often difficult to remember exactly what each letter was, and was frankly more effective as producing a pavlovian desire for dessert post-essay writing than anything more productive. There was, if I recall, always an ethics bit, always a historical bit, and absolutely always a mention of the recovery model. Only two or three sentences as a maximum on each. As he would often tell me, the idea was to pass and then put the whole process out of your mind- and the easiest way to do this was not to write an essay that was good, but one that was rather hard for the markers to fail.

That said, in the week beforehand, I noticed that writing to these metrics and mnemonics was actually rather difficult. More than that, it was uncomfortable. During practise sessions, I would hit writers block. (And writers block, for me, is a vanishingly rare thing). It became fairly apparent that the advice of my consultant, no matter how well meaning and pragmatic, simply wasn’t working.

The actual day of the exam was a nerve wracking one, and not only because I’d recently started a new rotation (that I wasn’t much enjoying). My wife took me to the exam building for the midday exam session; from there I waited in a hotel lobby with a group of nervous, fast speaking registrars for a brief period. After a few minutes, I sat quietly at a nearby table whilst the others were talking. There was a lot of worry about the quote. People kept on mentioning that strange quote about a psychiatrist moving through society like a fish in a ricepaddy that had been circulated a few years ago. What would they write if something like that came up?

I mumbled something about mutualistic symbiosis, and if all else fails being able to riff off Mao Zedong. Also, about whether the rice paddy was an eastern image being co-opted by a western psychiatric field, or whether its adoption in areas of Europe exempted it.

I didn’t say too much more on the topic. It was a broad enough image that you could analogise almost anything you like once you had a few factoids. Analogies are typically tricky like that. Were psychiatrists like fish in that they required external nutrition regularly added to the paddy to survive? That they improved life by the removal of biting insects (or perhaps other societal gadfly equivalents, if one wanted to go all Athenian on the matter?) In that rice was better off with them, but was not dependent – whereas the fish’s continued existence within that environment absolutely did seem rice dependent? More than that, what exactly did it say about the psychiatrist in question when he equated all the people he was treating as bits of rice – and him or herself as the only creature with mobility and even a rudiment of free will? It is, after all, a bit of a stretch to fit ‘values the recovery model’ and ‘analogises fellow humans as being pieces of cereal’ comfortably in a single essay…

I’m not widely listened to when I mumble like that. Perhaps for the best.

Regardless, we were eventually let into the exam room. It was a large venue filled with about forty nondescript white desks. The chairs were gray and slightly uncomfortable. We filed through one by one, presenting our identification, turning our phones off and putting them in small plastic bags. It was, I recall thinking, the type of screening for cheating that would only preclude the most unimaginative of fraudsters.

They also requested that we didn’t take bottles of liquid to the desks. Presumably so we couldn’t cram the complete works of Freud onto the labels or something similar.

Seated at the desk, we had a large pad of paper left in front of us, which we were not allowed to turn over. We also had a small sealed plastic bag. Inside this plastic bag wear orange earplugs, which I used immediately. The presenters spoke for a while about rules – in particular limits about when and how we could leave- and finally gave the instruction to read the quote.

At some point in the future, I’ll summarise my argument from the exam. The quote itself, though, was something I was familiar with; both the words itself and the background of the author. This level of knowledge was, oddly enough, not something I had been prepared for, despite it actually having occurred more often than not in my preparations.

So, on the day, I basically ditched all the mnemonics, the structure, and basically everything associated. I certainly didn’t write to the metric. Instead, I just churned out an argument built up in my head on the fly, providing a bunch of supporting (albeit very specific) facts about the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry based on the author’s work, and then attempting to pre-empt any counterarguments in a reasonable manner.

When I got the results back quite a long while later, I passed; and I think I passed comfortably. Of course, by that time I had a bit of a crisis brewing with my own mental health. But at least the exam was done.

So that was that.