Exams Time

So, the Junior Certificate, a thing in both in the state and in the house. 136,160 students sat it this year. I know a few of them. And it’s brought changes, not least a period of concentrated study. All seems about as calm as could be expected, there’s some confidence and some realism (maths appears to be genetically a problem for ByStorms – but thankfully science is okay, fingers crossed, and fun fact, spreadsheets and accounts are not alien to me or incomprehensible, it’s just equations, so that genetic problem is a bit selective) but it’s like the election, until the results are in who knows how things have gone really? 

But a bit like PTSD I’m getting flashbacks to sitting in exam halls – in Greendale Community School we did the Group in Second Year and the Intermediate in Third. Then it was on to the Leaving Certificate in Senior Two (which was the 5th and final year) though I seem to recall doing the Matriculation as well. And then there was repeating the Leaving Certicate in a fee-charging school, which to my perverse satisfaction saw little or no change in the results and had no impact on my getting into third level because that was on portfolio and interview. So that was a lot of exams across four or five years. A lot of exam halls. A lot of staring at exam papers with either Cold dread/Resignation/Mild anticipation/Actual enjoyment. That last was pretty perverse, but I enjoyed English and History and Art, and Irish on a good day – I wasn’t great at the last, I could speak it reasonably well but writing, I was not even so so. There were the ones you winged, could go okay, could go terrible, Economics, French. And others I can’t even recall doing, did I do Geography after the Inter? I don’t know. Does it matter, after all when was the last time someone asked you for your Leaving results, let alone Inter/Junior ones? Art I didn’t sit for classes due to a clash with another subject but did grand in the Leaving both times. Religion I enjoyed as a class, but we never had an examination.

I’ve never forgotten sitting there, looking at the front page of the exam book and realising that it had to be done. I’d micromanage the pencils and parers and erasers and try to make sense of the fact I was trapped in a space that was confined to the wooden rectangle of the table top. The other thing was to keep the head down and pretend that I was actually working through the papers, well at least for some of them.

There were stories, there were always stories. A sort of pre-internet/social media, mythology about students who were repeating and had – I kid you not, these were grim times, killed themselves during an exam with an upright pencil. I won’t go into details. It seemed unlikely, even at the time, but how could you check? Or less grim tales of people cheating. Equations on pieces of paper hidden up sleeves or scratched into those metal sets that contained protractors and so on. I heard of one person who had etched equations in miniature onto the plastic rulers and got away with it though my feeling was if you went to that much trouble you kind of deserved to take the win, the process of doing was almost certainly going to mean some knowledge rubbed off on you. I couldn’t be pushed. I mean, with maths I’d have needed toilet rolls covered in minute text swathed like bandages around my limbs and torso just to get to a point where I was able to barely grasp what was going on – and actually three and then two and then three years of study suggested to me that that still wouldn’t work. There didn’t seem to be any great point to that.

I was talking to a relative recently whose perception of it all was that I didn’t study ahead of that first Leaving. Not true. Not bleeding true at all. I studied a lot. I spent hours with Gerry Ryan’s show in the evening, what was it called – Rocksound? – looking at books, not necessarily in them, or tossing pens in the air and catching them, a skill that is not acknowledged widely enough in my view and certainly not at the Leaving, as I tried to drum various elements of education into my head. To little enough effect. Again I’d kind of checked out due to being depressed. But I went through the motions and more than the motions as we all did. And despite being resigned to failure, I did, bar one or two results, grand all things considered.

And then I repeated that process the following year. I read about people who get A’s or B’s in everything and I wonder about that. What’s that like? But I kind of suspect I know because the one’s I did well in weren’t difficult, didn’t raise a sweat, they could just be done and on to the next. It was the others that were hard fought, or not fought at all. That D in Chemistry almost meant more than the mark in History or whatever. Getting a passing grade in honours Irish eventually likewise. I did an okay Leaving both times but it was the edge cases that were the most satisfying. 

And as it happens the area of study I went into subsequently didn’t have any exams whatsoever – just assessments (and essays and theses, which are not the same thing). In fact the next and last exam I did was an open book one (I was amazed at the idea of that) in business accountancy on a Diploma course about ten years later. It almost didn’t feel like an exam at all. 

I think that exams can be a good part of a mix with continual assessment and tests along the way. Not that I’d want to face them ever again. Got a lot of sympathy for those who’ve had to just endure them.