It's guaranteed that at least once during an exam, I will have one of the above. There's an important difference between the two, but they're equally frustrating.
A "WTF moment" happens when you encounter a question about something you're positive you've never seen in your life. Maybe you zoned out in class, or maybe it was at the bottom of a page and you skipped over it, maybe your cat fell off a table and distracted you while you were reading it. In any case, it's there on the exam and it may as well be written in Ancient North Martian. WTF Moments require you to do nothing but full on guess. Maybe you can extrapolate an answer based on something else you know, but sometimes you just circle C. Yesterday, it was Diagnostic Imaging. I was flying through it confidently until I hit a brick wall. That wall had a sign on it that said: "At what point in gestation does fetal ossification happen in the dog?"
I think I actually heard crickets in my own head when I read that. My brain looked at it and said, "Okay hand, you're on your own. Just pick something." It was in our notes, I later found out. We have Powerpoints and Word documents, and usually they're pretty similar. Unfortunately, the Powerpoints totally failed to mention fetal ossification and I hadn't read the Word documents.... My bad. I picked C. It was wrong.
Mental Black Holes are a totally non-understood phenomenon. You read something. You reread something. You reread it a third, then a fourth time. Thirty seconds later, and... it's gone. It doesn't matter how many times you try to memorize some trivial little detail, you can't. There's no rhyme or reason to why it happens. This cropped up on Bacteriology last week. It was a matching question. I had it down to Burkholderia mallei and Burkholderia pseudomallei. One causes glanders in horses, one causes melioidosis in humans. I'd like to point out this is the second time I've learned these. I had them on another exam for a Medical Bacteriology course a few years ago. You'd think after getting it wrong back then, I'd get it right this time. No such luck. My brain refuses to accept that B. mallei causes glanders. "I reject your reality and substitute my own". In my brain's version of reality, B. mallei causes melioidosis, because M goes with M and that's nice and easy to remember. I even tried during the exam to say, "Okay, so it's the opposite of what I think it is." But then I managed to talk myself into thinking that I thought that B. mallei caused glanders, so therefore, it causes melioidosis.
I looked it up when I finished the exam. I won't pretend I didn't bang my head against my locker door a few times.
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