Exams!

My husband, David, woke up in a cold sweat the other night after dreaming that he had been about to take his ‘O’ level school exams, and had forgotten all he had learned!

This year’s exam season is upon us, my youngest nephew is just about to sit his GCSE’s so no doubt there will angst and stress in his family until the results are through! I am profoundly thankful that apart from our eldest daughter, who is doing a part-time MA in theology, exams are a thing of the past in our household!

Apparently children in the UK sit more public exams than anywhere else in the world. The pressure starts at seven years old when they sit their first SATS exams. These are Government tests, which are more a way of assessing how a school is doing rather than of benefit to the child. The results of the SATS tests, also sat at ages 11 and 14, determine a school’s position in the dreaded league tables! It is not surprising that lessons are geared towards getting the children to pass these tests, crowding out other lessons which might prove more valuable to the child in the long run. I have heard that some schools even have mock SATS exams to make sure the children are on task! In my opinion exam stress so young can only be bad for a child’s emotional and physical health!

At 16, 17 and 18 children sit GCSEs, A/S levels and A levels. Even an ‘A’ grade isn’t good enough these days, and to really do well you have to get an ‘A’ star! Just when they think it is all over, and the results good or bad come in, there is the annual round of carping! If the average grades are up, the exams have got easier, if the grades are down, the teachers can’t teach!

Even when you obtain your desired grades, and take out an ENORMOUS loan to finance you through university, you work hard, sit your final exams, only to find that the lecturers are on strike over pay and won’t mark the papers, as is the case at the moment!

Where exams are concerned it would seem that students are in a no win situation!

Just think, if Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, we would all have been spared sitting exams!