poph192 practice questions

skimming lecture slides is the default for a concept-heavy paper, and it is one of the least effective things you can do, because recognising a definition on a slide is not the same as producing and applying it. testing yourself instead, closing the slides and recalling the concept, is a top-utility technique in the evidence (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Dunlosky et al., 2013).

in poph192 the concepts, confounding, bias, the different study designs, are the whole game. explain each one in your own words from memory and, crucially, state when it applies, then check what you skipped. the gaps you find are the concepts you only recognised rather than understood, and those are exactly what the exam pushes on. (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Dunlosky et al., 2013)

elaborative interrogation, repeatedly asking why and answering it, is a higher-utility strategy precisely because it forces you to reason from principles rather than recall a label (Dunlosky et al., 2013). for a paper about evidence, that reasoning is the skill being assessed.

poph192 lives on knowing why one study design beats another for a given question. take a scenario and argue out loud which design you would choose, why a cohort might beat a case-control here, and what the weaknesses of your choice would be. this is the exact higher-order reasoning the exam tests, and practising it as an argument is far more durable than memorising a table of design features. (Dunlosky et al., 2013)

feedback only helps if it is specific and you act on it: research on feedback shows the useful kind tells you where you went wrong and how to close the gap, not just whether you were right (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). a bare score tells you almost nothing you can use.

for poph192, treat every wrong practice answer as information. write the single sentence that explains the error, was it a misread of the study design, a confused definition, a stats slip, before moving on. over a few weeks those sentences reveal your personal pattern of mistakes, which is the fastest thing you can fix. (Hattie & Timperley, 2007)

high grades in poph192 come from applying epidemiological reasoning to a scenario you have not met, judging the best design or spotting the bias in an unfamiliar study, not from reciting definitions. varied retrieval practice builds exactly this transfer of reasoning to new situations (Pan & Rickard, 2018; Carpenter et al., 2022), and for students heading to medicine it is the same habit that predicts later exam performance (Deng et al., 2015).

practise on fresh scenarios: take a described study you have not seen and decide what design it is, what could confound it, and how you would improve it. because the exam presents novel scenarios, rehearsing that judgement on unfamiliar cases is far more useful than memorising the features of each design in the abstract. (Pan & Rickard, 2018; Carpenter et al., 2022; Deng et al., 2015)