ELEANOR GOGGIN

Exams: I always hoped for divine intervention

When I was at school a long time ago, and I mean a long time ago, I was not one for studying. The opposite in fact — Radio Luxembourg and romantic novels under the covers. So I became the maestro at cogging. Two of my good friends were really good at maths and I absolutely hated maths, so I used to place myself strategically in between them at exams. They would both complete their first page and slip it to me for comparison. Any ones that had the same answer I copied. I wasn’t stupid enough to copy a wrong answer. There was some grey matter.

And then it came to college and there was no chance of cogging. I met a contemporary of mine recently who told me he has an abiding memory of me from days of yore. It would appear he went in to do an exam in the same hall as me. He looked at his exam paper and couldn’t answer anything so he contemplated walking out immediately but lost the bottle. And then he looked up and there I was sidling out the door after 10 minutes of twiddling my thumbs. He then felt emboldened to follow suit. I’m glad I helped people not to waste their time.

I haven’t done a written exam since. Until the other day that is. And it transported me back to the ‘Oh Jesus, I know nothing, how can I cog’ days. And once I saw a few things that I didn’t know I started to go into a blind panic and the stuff I did know went out of my head. And it wasn’t possible to cog. And because everyone was striving to do better than the next person, they wouldn’t have told me anyway. Now it wasn’t an exam that was going to determine my future but I still wanted to ensure that I didn’t come across as an ill-educated eejit. The chances are that is exactly what happened.