The Exam from Hell

Yesterday (as the title of this post may have suggested to the intelligent amongst you), I sat the Exam from Hell. It was several hours after it ended before I was finally convinced that if it was a nightmare I'd have woken up by now, and therefore I must actually be awake. (Incidentally, am I the only one who gets that feeling sometimes where you seriously believe you may be dreaming? It's scary, because you don't know if anything's real! Argh, the uncertainty!) Anyway, since then I have been to sleep, woken up and subsequently spoken to several people who have the same memories of the same nightmareish exam as me, so I'm working on the assumption that it was real. (Grrr.)

Weirdly, I had a feeling that the t-shirt I was wearing (my funky nun t-shirt, no less) might bring me bad luck, even though there's really no good reason why it shouldn't bring the best of luck. Well, other than the fact that the transfer had cracked, and as we all know, a cracked nun brings seven years' bad luck! (Oh, wait, that's mirrors. Hurrah!) Nonetheless, I told myself I was being silly and tried to persuade myself the nun would watch over me like a benificent angel, ensuring the long-dreaded History paper went smoothly. But oh no. Where was my guardian nun when I needed her? Laughing at my pain, no doubt. Bitch.

Our troubles began when we opened the first of the two History papers we were sitting that day and realised something was up. The exam board had decided - just for a laugh - to completely change around the format of the exam and the style of the questions, without telling us of this before hand. Oh, AQA, you are a card. (Bastards.) Now, as anyone who's taken AQA History to any level knows, the scariest thing about the exams is timing, because they always set the time limit for the exam at roughly half the time you would sensibly need to answer all the questions properly without setting fire to your hand. So having your carefully-drilled-into-you timing structure for answering the paper turned upside down is not the most helpful thing that can happen at the beginning of your A-level. Not only that, but the first question was a usefulness question. A usefulness question! I hadn't done one of those since GCSE, so I dredged up vague memories of provenance and relevance and cobbled together a half-baked answer, which rambled on for about twice as long as I usually spend on 10-mark questions.

Panicking at how behind I already was, I rushed on to the second question, the more familiar crazy three-regime, four-source essay, which is hard enough at the best of times without the title being something confusing about "conflict and antagonism". I got halfway through my answer to this question (which was a load of old bobbins because my mind was all in a flap) before realising that not only had I not made reference to any of the source material (which you need to do to get anything over half marks) - I hadn't even read two of the sources! As this realisation dawned on me, there was a beautiful moment when I thought, "Ah, I see what's happening, this is a nightmare! This is all going too absurdly wrong to be real. It's a panic dream and I'm about to wake up. Thank God for that." As the moments lengthened and I remained stubbornly sat in Room Bloody 14 with the Exam from Hell still in front of me, I realised that I was most probably awake and should get on with the exam rather than waiting to wake up.

Eventually, I finished my hashed-up second essay and moved on to the Stalin essay (which I now had just over 20 minutes to write, as opposed to the recommended 45.) The annoying thing with that was that it was a really easy title and one that I'd written a really good essay on quite recently, but I was unable to answer it properly because it was the most I could do to make it legible and looking vaguely like an essay before the time ran out. Argh.

The second paper was less hellish, barring an entire source covering a period we hadn't studied, but I am now very glad I didn't take History to degree level. The residual trauma of that exam could have ruined my university career.

(I realise that I've gone on and on and on about something very very boring, but I felt the need to vent, and what are blogs for if not for venting?)