Dreadful Nonsense

The exam, to no one's surprise but my own, went extremely well. Now, that makes me sound really big headed, like everyone around me knows that I'm going to do very very well, and only an idiot would assume otherwise, what with my mensa-scoring intelligence (in case you've forgotten, I've got a measured IQ of 131)... Well, yes, I am that idiot. I always assume that I'm going to do really badly on exams, mainly due to the fact that through my life I've done really badly on exams.

I'm not an exam person. I'm not good at revising, I'm not good at holding names and statistics and dates and methodology in my head. I'm very good at writing essays, because that's basically reading things that other people have written, and then putting it all in to your own words, or rearranging their words to make it look like your own words. I'm good at writing essays moments before their deadlines too, and I'm excellent at surprising myself that I've managed to make the deadlines. But I'm crap at exams.

The reason I ended up doing a degree in Media Studies is because I'm crap at exams. The whole way through my secondary school education, I had decided that I was going to be a speech and language therapist, as this seemed both a useful and interesting vocation. You leave college fully trained and experienced, with a proper job and title, and then you spend the rest of your life doing that. It seemed like the perfect plan. Except that I didn't get enough points in my leaving certificate to get a job in McDonalds, partly due to the fact that I spent the last two years of school messing around with Mrs D and D, and partly due to the fact that I'm very very rubbish at exams.

In exams, my brain freezes up and I lose the ability to write anything but the most ridiculously general nonsense. Not even specific nonsense, you understand. Just general stuff. About air and colours and trees and windows and monkeys. In every exam. It tends to get you low points.

So when I left school, I didn't get a place in college, I wandered around my life for a year being really quite unhappy and working in various banks (which didn't help alleviate the unhappiness) and finally started a foundation course in media studies, because I liked watching telly, and that was media studies, wasn't it?

Yes, it pretty much was.

Unfortunately, although arts degrees are the best thing to do in college, because college is really all about fun and living away from your parents, and running up debt and working out how much you can drink before you pass out, and meeting boys and such, and not so much about the education and career prospects, they don't leave you with much more than serious liver damage and some recurring STDs... I would imagine.

So, to the exam I had today, which, as I said at the start before I went off on this unexpected rant, went well. In the first section, you had to give short definitions for 5 out of 10 options. I was able to answer 3 of these to within an inch of their life, and had a fair stab at the remaining two. In the second section, there were three essays. Two of them I managed quite well indeed, and one of them I totally made up. Completely. It was based on nothing at all to do with my degree, or anything I've learned in the last year. Which should be interesting to see, marks wise, when the exam comes back.

In December.

I don't get my results before then. So until then I can dance about in the happy knowledge that I've maybe probably passed this part of the degree, and just be content with that.

This entry was posted on 12 October 2004 at 11:22 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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