Diabetology exam experience

I finished the first exam of this semester on Thursday. This semester we are so lucky that we have some exams before the exam period (not sarcastic). The exam in “Internal Medicine – Diabetes and Angiology” is actually only about diabetes, and it’s a relatively small exam.

Like all exams for us this semester, diabetology exam was online. The worst part of the exam for me was waiting; we were scheduled to have the exam during the time when we normally had diabetology seminars, which for my group was Thursday 8 – 9:30. So we all had to be ready at Teams at 8 and just wait to be called. I was the very last student in my group to have the exam, and so I was called up at 10:30. That sucked.

Because other groups had their exams earlier in the week, and because we’d talked to 6th year students, everyone knew that this was to be a relatively easy exam, where they ask simple questions. My examiner was Dr. Gergő Molnár. The questions I was asked were also simple:

• What are the four diagnostic criteria for diabetes mellitus?
• What are the major classes of diabetes mellitus?
• Give an example of monogenic type of diabetes
• Give some examples of endocrine diseases that could go along with diabetes
• Give some examples for medications which could induce diabetes
• If you have a patient with type 2 diabetes who receives metformin but has not reached the target HbA1c, and has signs of proteinuria, so we would consider him to have chronic kidney disease, what would the preferred drug class of choice?
• Name some examples for SGLT-2 inhibitors and GLP-1 receptor agonists
• Give an example of an ultra-long acting insulin analogue
• Give an example of an ultra-short acting insulin analogue
• You have a patient with multiple daily insulin injections who complains about having high glucose values every morning.
  • What could be the two causes for that?
  • How can you distinguish between the two causes?
  • How would you adjust the dose of the evening NPH insulin if it was the Somogyi effect?
• You have a patient who is young and you’re struggling to determine whether he has type 1 or type 2 diabetes because he’s not very lean and not very thick. Which objective measurements could be used to distinguish between the two?

And that were all the questions I got. The exam was recorded, and the recording was 5 minutes and 36 seconds long, so it was a short exam. I answered all questions correctly. He didn’t tell me which grade I got (only that it was very good) but if I got anything other than 5 I’ll rebel.

On Monday at 9 we have written ophthalmology “competition”, and if we do well at that we get exempted from the oral exam. Because I failed derma last year, I also have a written derma “competition” the same day at 11. Then we have forensic medicine written “competition” on Thursday.