Introduction
This section does not just apply to drug metabolism, but to almost any life-science subject. Obviously, the type of examination you might be sitting for this subject could be anything from continuous assessment, through to multiple choice or essay-style questions. It is true that the vast majority of students extract from the university system more or less exactly what they put in. Every student, if they are honest, knows that they will get the degree they deserve and most put in enough effort to achieve this. If all you want is a modest degree, then you will not exert yourself, no matter what your lecturers say. However, there will be a fair number of students who would like to obtain the very best degree they can, but are unsure as to how to achieve this. Often, it is possible to emerge from 13 years of school examinations and still be none the wiser as to how to produce a first-class performance, even though you are capable of it. So how is it done?
This does not consist of simply reproducing, like an elaborate living photocopier, the notes your lecturer gave you – you need much more than this. The detail of the lectures is a starting point, a platform, if you like, for building a first-class answer. If you have learned the course then you can understand and exploit the opportunity for extra reading and graft the extra knowledge onto your existing knowledge. This means you can show that you know and understand more than you were given. The initial source of this extra reading could be a topic, but at the highest level it is better to use primary knowledge from journals. You may not be able to understand all of a scientific paper, but the introduction and discussion will provide an overview of the subject and if you read a few papers on the subject, you will see that they basically say the same thing. Another essential component in the construction of a first- class answer is the integration of your knowledge, perhaps with different courses and particularly in how you answer the question. Up to now, your answer will be clearly different from the run-of-the-mill student effort, but it still lacks a vital component for top marks. This final component can only appear once you have mastered the previous ones. You need to be ‘creative’. Your answer must show depth of thought about a subject that means you have evaluated the available knowledge and come up with your own view and even your own interpretation on it. At the stage of a final degree, the subject is still evolving and 5, 10 or 20 years later, you might look back and see how wrong the prevailing wisdom of the time was, in terms of understanding of a particular phenomenon. So it is right to question the ideas and theories of current scientific literature, providing it is done through logical argument. So the five components are:
• learn and understand the lecture notes;
• extra reading of primary literature;
• demonstrate integration of knowledge;
• answer the specific question;
• show originality of thought and analysis.
If you can manage all this, your answer will practically leap off the page and stun your examiner, as the majority of students are either not prepared or not intellectually able to go to these lengths to succeed and this shows in their answers. It is unlikely that most of you can write first-class answers on every subject in your course. However, you should be able to, on courses that you find particularly interesting, as your interest makes the work easier to absorb. On courses that you really do not enjoy or have always had trouble with, work on them to the point where you can get a good second-class answer no matter what the question.
