‘HAPPIEST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE, THEY RECKON...’ CAROLYN HITT’S MUST-READ VERDICT ON EXAM SEASON
IT’S EXAM Season. I was reminded of this as the photo of my eldest nephew’s 30th birthday celebrations popped up on Instagram. He was born the day before my A-levels began.
All I wanted to do was get down to East Glam hospital and coo over his little pink wrinkly face, but I was stuck in my bedroom swotting The Theme of Procrastination in Hamlet.
Happiest days of your life, they reckon. But it feels like I spent more time incarcerated in a small room in the late 1980s than Fletcher in Porridge. And he didn’t have to Blu Tack a giant revision planner to the wall and worry about the impact of Nonconformity on politics between the middle of the 19th century and 1914.
I still get classic anxiety dreams about exams. I’ve sat my A-levels about 247 times in my sleep. It’s always the same dream. Turn the paper over and it’s not even a subject I recognise. Or I’m standing in a church hall in Pontypridd as the Grade VIII music examiner barks, “You can begin playing now,” and I bleat back, “but I don’t even play the euphonium, sir”.
Between the ages of 14 and 21 that’s all life seemed to be about. Worrying about exams, swotting for exams, taking exams.
University was exam-dominated, none of this modular, continual assessment nonsense, sadly. There were tests on the first day of every term to ensure we’d spent the holidays cramming. They called them “Collections” for some reason. All I remember is, I never seemed to “collect” enough knowledge of The Dream of the Rood to survive an Anglo Saxon translation exam.
There were exams at the end of the first year called Mods. Nothing to do with Paul Weller. Mods was short for Honour Moderations.
By the time Finals arrived, cockney rhyming slang was employed. The talk was of getting a Geoff (Geoff Hurst – First); a Desmond (Desmond Tutu – 2:2) or a Dougie (Douglas Hurd – Third). There was no jokey euphemism for a 2:1 but the implication was that was the boring norm. The brilliant students got a Geoff while the party animals revelled in their Dougie.
Finals were squeezed into a single week and taken two a day in full academic dress – gown and mortar board. I can still recall the smell of the disinfectant they used to clean the imposing gothic edifice that was the Examination Schools building. If I catch a whiff of it 27 years later I am sent into full Proustian panic mode.
Thankfully, I managed to keep it together at the time. Not everyone did. As the clock struck nine on the morning of the first final, one girl started wailing and sprinted out of the hall, weaving her way erratically through 200 desks. There was a collective sigh of relief. According to urban exam myth, once somebody had done a runner, no-one else would fail. I often wonder what happened to that girl.
I identified with her sense of terror. The time limit was the most masochistic aspect of exams. From the minute the invigilator instructed us to turn the paper over, the hands of that giant clock at the apex of the hall ticked with malevolent acceleration.
How could three hours just whizz by? I don’t think I ever finished an exam with time to spare in my life. There would always be some smug swot demanding more paper while I was still arranging my pen, spare pen, Polo mints and lucky gonk.
I’d waste another five minutes trying to comfort myself that this other girl was only galloping ahead on the stationery front because she probably had that horrible big bubble writing while my nice copperplate could be easily accommodated by the first book of foolscap.
Then there was the time spent agonising over which essay question to choose. Also known as Find The Question That Vaguely Fits The Answer I’ve Completely Rehearsed.
And then, once your Bic was positively dancing over the paper, the voice of doom interrupted with those soul-crushing words: “Time’s up. Stop writing now, please.”
I’d then make a sharp exit, avoiding the Exam Debrief at all costs. At this point there is only one sentence worse than “put your pen down” and it’s your mate asking: “What did you put for 3b?”
All these years later, it’s curious to reflect on just how much exams dominated our young lives because in adult life no-one is that bothered about them. Indeed, anyone over 46 takes great pains to hide the fact they even took O-levels. Because they were replaced by GCSEs in the late 80s, so putting them on your CV is recruitment suicide. We might assume we’re bringing essential experience to the role but some ageist hipster millennial will just think we’re Methuselah.
But we’re not too removed from today’s teens to empathise with the anxieties of Exam Season. They’ve got it worse in many ways. My 16-yearold nephew has been taking GCSEs since he was 13. “Banking” exams in these ways may suit schools battling to maintain their position in the results league but it’s not in the interest of the pupil who may scrape a C at 13 and have their confidence knocked when they could have hung on until they were 16 and got an A*.
Today’s students also have to share their exam journey with the world, which brings its own pressures. Isn’t it stressful enough picking up your results in private, let alone with the local paparazzi tracking every lipquiver and stomach flip?
The media coverage of exam success is becoming almost fetishised. Live blogging from school playgrounds; pupils forced to open their envelopes on air and then cry into the microphones of regional reporters; the ubiquitous tales of triplets with identical clutches of A*s... IVF has a lot to answer for.
The narrative of academic achievement is now played out with more dramatic tension than a drum-thudded cliffhanger on EastEnders. Noone gave a stuff when we shuffled into the staff room to collect our O-level results. There was no weeping, cwtching or squealing like stuck pigs every time we ripped an envelope open. Just a furtive glance over your mates’ shoulders that could end in envy or Schadenfreude.
But then, even if we had gone in for hormonal frenzies on results day in 1985, I couldn’t have kissed any of my friends thanks to a stress-induced cold sore that covered most of my lower face. If the Ponty Observer had considered us remotely newsworthy I certainly wouldn’t have made the photographic grade looking like a medieval plague victim.
Three decades later I’m still in the classroom thanks to weekly Welsh lessons. We were told we could take an exam at the end of the course but it was optional. I declined. Learning for learning’s sake is one of the great pleasures of adult life. And my days of revision planners, agonising over 3b and anxiety-triggered Herpes simplex are well and truly over.
Education Wales: In tomorrow’s Western Mail