The destructive power of exams
For many years I loved it when exams came around. They were a lot more fun than normal lessons for me (easier and nice when completed) and so I loved them through primary school all the way up to Y9 SATs. The main reason they were so much fun was that revision, if it existed at all, was minimal and so I could enjoy the whole atmosphere. I love the clacking of the invigilator’s shoes (obviously I only got this once I got to secondary school), the ticking clock, the scratching of pens. But while I can still appreciate these and the whole exam zone now, they are no longer my favourite time of the year. I have joined the ranks of Everyone Else in dreading exams coming along, and why? For three simple reasons: having to revise, and because the exams matter, and because I can’t just get high marks easily anymore.
It has of course been increasingly in the news of late that school pupils in this country are thought to be seriously over-tested, and for a long time I didn’t think this was an issue because actually, people around me did realise when the tests mattered and when they didn’t. But I’ve realised this is no longer the case, or I was ignorant to others in the past. My sister has recently done her Y9 SATs at the age of fourteen, and in the run up to this became incredibly worked up. She did hours and hours of revision, she worried about them, she struggled through past exam papers. I told her multiple times that this didn’t make sense, that the exams mattered only for the school and not the individual at this stage. But she insisted that they decided her set for GCSE and thus she must do as well as possible. To me it seems highly probably that an unfair image has been impressed upon her by her teachers and realistically if she didn’t get what she was capable of then they would surely set her appropriately for the next year. It is unreasonable to make a yeargroup of children feel this way about something that is so insignificant.
But that is about an exam that doesn’t matter, and obviously my AS level modules do. Revision and exams though have really spoilt in many ways my lower sixth year. Consider my subject of History. For most of secondary school it was my absolute favourite subject, above even maths, and it was only superceded by RE (religious education) during the latter part of GCSE when I gained my present philosophy teacher for this subject, who made RE into a philosophy lesson in many ways. But as GCSE exams drew closer and once I started this year I have come to almost hate it; it has caused many hours of misery. This is because I cannot enjoy the subject when I am continuously having to think about how whatever exercise or reading I am doing is going to help me with my exams. When I read something academic that isn’t for school, it’s wonderously enjoyable and I can get a lot out of it. But that ceases to be the case once you bring in the fact that I need to get an A in this subject to go to the university I want to go to.
In addition to this I am useless at revision, and am useless at keeping pure knowledge in my head. I can think of the ideas, I can debate the bigger picture and get to the heart of the matter. But I can’t remember the date Hitler became Chancellor of Germany or when the first Jews were gassed at Auschwitz without a lot of effort. And of course as seems to be the case with most people I have lots of useless (for exam purposes, there we go again: an eternal focus) knowledge floating around in my head. I can still sing through the vast majority of Les Misérables, for example. So I get more and more worked up about how I can’t revise and am never going to keep it in my head, and then I get unworked up by the fact that I do actually seem to remember more than others and in any case one always remembers more in the actual exam once in the zone. But it still makes my life unpleasant in the run up to the day.
So I hope that I have demonstrated how in my life, exams seem to have great destructive power. They stop me from exploring subjects, they become the sole focus (I hate myself when I ask teachers, “right, which bit of this do I need to know for the exam” but I know I can’t remember it all). At the heart of all this is the fact that I am far too bothered about getting to the university I want to go to and thus concentrate so much energy and thought into those grades. I try not to judge myself as a person based on exam results, but that doesn’t stop me continually checking that my academic path, which I may not even get onto anyway, is not hindered in anyway by the way my work is focussed.
You may have observed that I’ve made two changes to this blog lately. Firstly, I changed the design yesterday because I was getting annoyed with the fact that my posts looked shorter than they are because they aren’t in the thin column they are now; this also makes them easier to read. Secondly, I’m posting more regularly and more, er, personally; it’s becoming more like a diary than a logbook. Hopefully this will make my posts more pleasant and interesting to read, for the few people that do.