How to tackle those exams

I am renowned for my natural aversion for anything called an examination. At this time of the year my sympathies go out to all those who are about to endure this form of intellectual torture. I have always entertained the thought that people who set examinations have a tinge of sadism, that is, enjoy inflicting pain on others. In actual fact, a former maths teacher of mine used to hiss the adage; ‘No Pain, No Gain!’ This article serves as both community service and humanitarian assistance for all you exam sufferers. How you cope with all that studying and what methods are sure to bring the required results, that is, falling short of bribing the examiner and/or invigilator, or ‘shopping’ for a qualification on the internet.

I will dig from my huge reserves of experience in preparing and sitting for exams having seen it all right from the Pre-School entrance exam through to the university degree. Grade 7, which we derogatively referred to as a test, was a walk in the park. We all got our places at secondary school well before the results were out. Failing such an exam, was taking being daft to greater depths if you ask me. And yet we had people failing the ‘test’ left, right and centre.

We never ‘studied’ in the true sense of the word. We crammed information. In fact, this was rammed into our supposedly thick heads through the liberal use of the rod by our Gestapo trained teachers. This was particularly so with mathematics, the worst subject in living memory. The drill was to wake up at such an ungodly hour that one would occasionally bump into a witch from her nocturnal mission. We were then required to sing everything from the multiplication table right down to geometry until the rest of the school trooped in wondering whether we had slept there.

We passed all right, but that did not prepare me for the horror that we were to encounter at high school. First, we had too many subjects and this I bitterly complained to my father, who reminded me that he had studied more. Secondly, our crop of teachers literally terrorised us. I would have been convinced they had been discharged from some boot camp for using excessive force on their charges.

I was later to learn that this was the case with all boarding schools. It was part of the culture that only blood, sweat and tears produced results. Studying became an obsessive affair. People read books until smoke came out of their ears. Some of us would go for days without any sleep. This was done with the aid of ‘wake up’ pills which were available at any reputable supermarket in town.

Others, tired of cramming, would employ drastic and sometimes, baffling measures in a futile attempt to short-circuit the rigorous studying process. It was a pervasion of the principle of osmosis, that is, the movement of water molecules from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration through a permeable membrane. In this case, one would go to sleep with a voluminous textbook under the pillow - we used to refer to a very thick textbook as a ‘volume’ – in the vain hope that information would then travel from a dense medium (the volume) to an extremely less dense medium (the thick head) overnight. Whether this worked or not is yet to be put through empirical testing. Some of us passed the exams through divine or spiritual intervention.


University was a different bottle of beer...quite literally. How was one expected to pass when right there, smack in the middle of campus, was the cheapest bar this side of Tropic of Capricorn? Coming as they did from a very cloistered existence at some religious boarding school, some of our colleagues literally drowned in alcohol. They would only emerge for air and lectures and the toilet. Exams were just an irritating formality. The motto was: “We drink daily and pass annually.”

Interestingly enough, it was the sober ones who could not take the pressure. The number of students who were sent down that is, taken to the local mental facility rose as exam time approached. In one classic case, a medical student decided that it was through the digestive tract that he could absorb information. He literally swallowed half a ‘volume’ journal before being taken to hospital to have his stomach pumped.

Or this other student, who after pumping his brains full of ‘aerodynamics’ thought he could put that into practice by jumping out of the third floor window of the library. Unfortunately for him, the hard concrete floor below had other ideas. At least he managed to delay sitting for his exam by a year while his Plaster of Paris bound body healed. Needless to say that he is now a very successful politician having completely lost faith in Pure Science.

But then I digress. This article was supposed to offer tips on passing exams. The best advice I can give is that you should take comfort in the fact that you are not alone. When in an exam room, take a look to your right, then left, and then right again and you will see what I mean. Be calm, drink lots of water (avoid alcohol) and have plenty of sleep. Burning the midnight candle will burn you out. The cold fact is that if you have not grasped it by now, then you never did.