Exams, stress and comparisons.
As a person that's currently doing a metric shit tonne of exams; I'm quite annoyed.
It's not only the exams that annoy me. It's everyone's attitudes towards the entire thing. I mean, these "exams" are only mock exams, they don't actually count for anything in the grand scheme of things. The exams themselves do annoy me, though.
"But why, why do these wonderful exams annoy you so much?" - Exams are supposed to test how much you know. The dictionary definition of an examination (here) is "to test a candidate's knowledge and skill". This, in essence is a good idea, it is designed to test how much knowledge and skill that a person has. Exams however don't do this. They are nothing at all but a test of memory. It's a test of how much of your life prior to the exam you spend reading books, copying meaningless words out onto paper that you'll put in a folder and never see again, how much of your own time you sacrifice in order to remember certain information for two weeks before it floats away from your mind again, as it did before. If you don't spend 90% of your awake life staring at this information that quite frankly doesn't matter, you'll "fail". I however have a solution for this problem; surprise exams. Throughout the year, you will be called to a room and asked 5 random questions to do with the subject in question. The exam is spoken and recorded, and the questions differ per person. This really would test someone's knowledge. It would test how much they can recall if asked something unplanned about the subject. This would eliminate people getting stressed about an exam, spending their own time, their break time, their lunch time, staring at books hoping that some extra information will go into their misguided brain. This would eliminate the unfairness of the entire thing being a test of someone's short term memory. It would also eliminate the "Did you get X on question Y?" which happens after every exam without fail. It doesn't matter what you got for question Y, you've done it now, nothing will change the answer you put.
"But exams are important! THEY WILL DECIDE YOUR FUTURE" - No. No they won't. At least not at GCSE level. If you fail your fucking Biology GCSE, I'm sure you'll be able to live a nice happy life at the end of it. I don't really think it matters. Speaking as education does, when you get a job you'll walk into an interview and the employer will look at your GCSE grades. I'm 100% sure that if you want to be a translator the employer will not say "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid we've decided you're not capable of taking a statement in one language and changing it to another because you can't successfully label a human heart with no mistakes at all". That will not happen. At all.
Now, story time. I got a C in one of my Chemistry exams, and because the education system is based off of target grades, I was asked to do it again. Admittedly I usually get a B/A, and not a C, and my "target grade" is an A. This however definitely does not mean I should do it again. So, naturally, when my teacher asked, I turned to her and said "No". The look of confusion on her face was brilliant. She was shocked that someone in the "most intelligent" class decided to stand up for what they think. The person who was sat next to me at the time turned to me and said, and I quote - "Don't you WANT to do well?" To this, I replied with "What do you class as "well" then?" and she said that an A or A* is good. Well, I'm sorry but fuck off. A pass is a pass. It doesn't matter if you got a C or an A*, you have "proved your knowledge and skill" and passed the exam. The fact that the person had the nerve to ask me if I want to do well was stupid, if I'm honest. I recently also did an English Language exam, in which I got a high B. Now, I think that a high B is pretty damn good. The head of English at my school approached everyone that didn't get their "target grade" and told us that we were going to resit. Under half an hour after this, I went to her office and told her that under no circumstances was I re-doing the exam. She of course wasn't happy about this and said we'd "discuss" it later. I knew this meant she'd come to me at a point during the day, take me out of a lesson and say "you're doing it". Surprisingly though, she didn't. She didn't even talk to me, she just decided that I was going to do it, and moved me into the class of people that are re-doing the exam. At this point, I was rather angry. Whilst walking from my original class to my "new" one, I saw her, and as we were walking past she made a stupid comment - "Stop complaining about moving" (worth noting it was CLEAR myself and a couple of friends weren't even talking about that), to which I replied "Doesn't matter, I'll be moving back". This was a stupid comment in reply to her stupid comment. I still think that it was a completely justified comment. She stopped me from walking to my "new" class, and shouted at me. And I don't just mean a short shout. She stood shouting at me for a good 5 minutes telling me to "stop trying to second guess them" and "don't complain". So, the next day I complained, which was the natural thing to do for me. She wasn't at all happy, but to be honest I don't care. Then, she did something that really, really annoyed me. One of my good friends had their test remarked, and after it came back he had his target grade and didn't need to re-do the exam. During English, the head of English called him into her office to tell him. She said (according to him) on his way out "You can't gloat to me because you're not doing it. You can gloat to (my-name) though". This made me angry to no end. I wrote out a letter of complaint to the head of the school about her, and was going to send it in. Before I had a chance, though, I was told that I didn't have to re-do the exam if I didn't want to. I'm assuming I either did something that made an impression, or someone overheard me talking to friends about the letter and told her; at which point she knew that she was fucked essentially, because she was in the wrong with the situation. Now, every time she comes into my English after I got moved back, I look like Jeremy Clarkson with his smug face on. (image)
I could go on forever about people's attitudes towards exams, but I'll save it for another day. I will, however talk about comparisons. This is still exam related. There is this one kid in our year, who everyone thinks is the cleverest person in the world, for some reason. In reality he's a massive cock whose parents are clever and probably taught him to read whilst he was in the womb. I have a massive hate for this guy. The other day, I was eating lunch, and I heard my friend say to another one of my friends "I think I've beaten (his-name) in the science exam!" at which point I turned to them and shouted about how he's a massive cock. I do have a legitimate point though. In short, not everyone has the same strengths/weaknesses, and a lot of different factors have an impact on intelligence. For example, neither of my parents went to university and they don't have the best jobs. I somehow though, managed to be put in the "intelligent" classes and have high "target grades", so I'm at a disadvantage to someone who probably lives in a 50 bedroomed house with parents who are scientists. Comparing myself to him is generally not a fair comparison at all. It's not fair to compare me to him in science, because he's better at it and both of his parents work in science. It would be unfair to compare him to me in IT, because that's the subject in which I specialise, and he's not great at it. The whole comparisons thing annoyed me again yesterday. We recently did a maths mock exam, in which there are two papers, calculator and non-calculator. I don't like telling people what I get in exams, because quite frankly, it doesn't make a difference to them. However, because I don't tell people what I get, it's assumed that I do really badly. I don't, I got an A in the exam in question. We had got the non-calculator marks back, and as we were walking my friend turned to me and said "Don't worry, you'll do better than me in the calculator paper". I'll be honest, this infuriated me. For a start, he assumes that I do badly in exams. Secondly, he assumes that I don't tell people my mark because I didn't do as well as them. Thirdly, he assumes that I give a flying fuck as to whether I did better or worse than someone. I don't know why anyone would care if they did better/worse than someone else, I mean, does it really matter?
The cause of all of these problems is stress. People are stressed that they won't succeed in life because they didn't do well in 1/18th of their Science GCSEs. People are stressed that their friends did better than them. People are stressed that they got a question wrong. In short, people need to not stress about exams, they're not the end of the world.