This page is to help you prepare for the practical skills exams of this course.

Exam Format

I will be evaluating the practical skills of all graduate students first.  The graduate students will then assist me in grading your skill sessions based on a random assignment of students to evaluators.  Assessments will be standardized as best as possible using a rubric of skills and verbal answers to questions that I will develop and provide each assessor.  The content of these rubrics follow based on links to final rubric assessment sheets that will actually be used for each exam.

Practical Skills Exam 1

The following link provides the content that is assessable for practical exam 1.  This will be the exact content of the exam, except for the bold and italicized content of some of the questions, which will change (e.g. you will get different values to calculate ergometry data and steady state VO₂).

Be alert.  Practical exams brutally reveal what you do and do not know.  You must practice skills for this exam.  If you do not, you are asking for trouble in the assessment!

Schedule all practice sessions with Joan as per laboratory testing procedures.  The format and student schedule of the exam will be as follows.

Practical Skills Exam 2

The following link provides the content that is assessable for practical exam 2.  Read through the content of the instructions for Exam 2 to learn more about the software used in the exam to present the data files that are graphed.  Make sure you can interpret and explain all data sets, as well as calculate how to convert gas fractions to inspired or alveolar gas partial pressures.

The following link provides a PowerPoint file of all the 14 Figure data images of the program you will be assessed from.

As for practical exam 1, schedule all practice sessions with Joan as per laboratory testing procedures.  Where possible, the student schedule of the exam will be reversed from practical exam 1, however, this will not always be possible due to individual preferences for the Tuesday vs. Thursday sessions of exam week.

Based on the table below, you will see that there will be three computer systems for this exam.  Each session is for 10 min.