Exam Stress!

The pressure on us to do well in exams today is getting ridiculous. If you don’t do well in your exams you won’t get good grades in the summer, meaning you can’t go to the university you wanted to go to, so you won’t gain a degree as high as you could have, meaning you won’t get a great job, therefore you won’t enjoy life as much... So to sum up, if I don’t do well in these exams I won’t be happy later in life?

Nowadays you need to have qualifications to get you anywhere, but the pressure on how you get them is all a bit too much in my opinion. Teachers seem to leave it until only a few weeks before the actual exams and then they tell us over and over how important the exams are for our future, and how we only have one chance so we can’t mess it up. Then we are asked the rhetorical question “do you want to ruin your chance for a good future?” in a patronising tone.

The amount of information we need to take in, understand and remember seems so vast, and all for one paper that probably won’t even contain the questions that you have really good answers for.

We are put in huge rooms where we are drowned by the number of other students in there - who most of which we don’t recognise - and are told to sit in silence. It soon becomes apparent that not everyone...or everything understands this as the noise of an impatient clock ticks away, counting us down to the very last second.

I find that the very idea of the exam puts me off and makes me nervous. I spend my time at home spreading sheets of paper over the floor and trying to sort them into some sort of order to make revision easier, then before I know it my night is over and - oh yes, I haven’t done any revision!

Stress from exams is bad for our health and for the outcome of the exams themselves, I really believe less pressure should be put on us and more time should be allocated for revision in college with teachers.