OK, so, this morning, your blogger sat down with his MPT practicebook and started in on the first group of one hundred questions. This is the first "practice MBE" I have taken, understand, so I sat down wondering what two hundred questions would do to a person's brain.

I found out when I sat down to grade the second hundred.

I should start by saying, I don't want anyone to think my score on the first hundred questions were anything to write home about. They absolutely were not. I still have a lot of work to do, but nothing I don't think I can get under control in the next 21 days. *gulps* No, seriously. I think they were okay.

But I did notice, as I got to the late 80s and nineties this morning, I was starting to get a little bored and less engaged with the questions, and my rate of getting those right reflected it.

So, after a lunch break, I figured it would be interesting to see if I got fewer right in the afternoon. Took the test, thought I did probably about as well as I did the first time around.

So, I start grading. 1 was wrong. 2 was wrong. 6, 7, 8 were wrong.

And as I go along and I'd gotten 18 out of 75 right, I was thinking, "Well, crap, I'd like to get at least half of half of them right!" Which, by the time I finished grading, I'd not done.

How to explain it? It must have been a huge dropoff in attentiveness or something. Casting about for some way to deal with it, I was absent-mindedly flipping through the book, when something occurred to me.

Y'know, since I answered questions 101-200, it might help if I graded answers 101-200 and not regraded 1-100.

This improved my score dramatically.

Good grief, people. I'm going to be in the loony bin before this is all over.