This got me thinking about the effects exams have on our lives. We spend about a month stuck in a small, over crowded, overheated room staring at books full of mostly irrelevant information. Despite the fact that these rooms are over crowded we find ourselves completely isolated from our friends and the outside world. We come up with every possible form of procrastination in the hopes of distracting ourselves from the inevitable – studying.
Once our flats are spotless, we’ve been to the gym, phoned granny and taken up a couple extra hobbies we eventually run out of ideas. Out of pure boredom and fear we begin studying. Now, irrespective of whether we enjoy the subject or not we find ourselves wishing, hoping and maybe even praying for exams to end.
Then, one morning, you wake up and it’s suddenly exam day. You have at least half a nervous breakdown and run around screaming for half an hour. When you eventually calm down you start cramming your brain full of facts that you hope will be in the exam. At this point, time is flying by and going backwards all at the same time. Your brain is confused as to whether it wants to get the exam over and done with or whether it would like more time to cram.
You find yourself sitting in an exam room surrounded by the people you know and love except you don’t want to talk to them for fear of causing any more unnecessary panic nor let on the fact that you clearly aren’t ready to right. Last minute panic sets in and you find yourself wondering whether you should just attempt second opportunity or not.
If you do decide to stay, then you watch as the examiner hands out the paper. The people who know what they’re doing look through the paper nodding their heads and highlighting particular questions that they know will be easy. The rest of you sit there starring at the pages waiting for something to happen. You look at the clock and somewhere in the back of your mind you hear the examiner say you may begin writing.
You instantly know that you’ve made the wrong decision. You should have run away while it was still a possibility but now it’s too late and you find yourself making things up and attempting to copy from the person in front of you who is probably just as clueless as you are. Eventually you get to the point where you actually cannot possibly come up with anymore stuff to write down, you give up and walk out.
You know immediately that you’re not going to do well but you hope for the best. And then the stress really begins as you wait for your results. Unsure about whether you’ll be able to write the second opportunity or not, because you know for a fact that you didn’t pass.
It drives us completely insane!! Exams have an unrelenting way of working on your nerves and sleeping patterns to the point where you think you might just collapse. But eventually when it’s all over, you head home for your holiday, grateful that it’s all over and done with and that you know have sometime to recover with your family and friends safe in the knowledge that there is nothing more that can be done. It is out of your hands and there is no way of changing anything.
So while you’re all sitting there studying, put your minds at ease with the realization that exams do eventually pass and sometime in the future you shall return to the big, wide world as a fully functional person. In the meantime however, stop reading my blog as a form of procrastination and go study…
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