Candidates range from hopeful to totally hopeless as shown by the following responses to these perfectly legitimate questions separately set for Engineering and Philosophy Exams respectively:
Q. What does the term hydrodynamics mean?
A. It means I will fail this paper. (Response from a hopeless engineering student)
Q. If this is a question, answer it.
A. If this is an answer, mark it. (Answer from a hopeful philosophy student)
It is no wonder that some students in Japan petitioned their government to ban examinations because they led to suicide. A somewhat valid point if you look at the propensity youth from that island tend to cut their little lives short. I must confess that at some point in my exciting life, I did harbour such thoughts.
I can still remember the shrill voice of my former Maths teacher who on the eve of external examinations shouted, “You will fail, fail, fail! Then your mother will cry. Your father will cry, and so will your brothers and sisters. Even your dog will cry, and you will be very sorry!”
That was during our final revision where we would have been bamboozled by some equation. And so it was torture from beginning to the end. Yet we all passed with varying degrees of success. I have passed exams and of course failed some. I was your average student yet I can call myself something of an authority on exams. Add to that my years as an invigilator and marker from high school to university level. As if that’s something to be proud of.
First, a bit of history; at pre-school, or crèche for some of you, there was nothing of the sort. Exams I mean. We were banished there by our parents to get us out of the way of the rest of humanity. We played ourselves senseless and went home bundles of dirt which took the maid the whole evening to wash off.
The only testing activity I can remember was cramming my one liner for the Christmas nativity play. I had graduated from being Joseph’s donkey to the inn keeper. No one dared fluff their lines as that would haunt you for the rest of pre-school.
At primary school I had a teacher whose first name was Rhodesia. For purposes of lessening the embarrassment such a name would conjure at a time when the word ‘war’ wasn’t a metaphor, they called him Rhodes. So much about colonial names, exams then were a minor distraction.
But tell that to Rhodes Ncube who towards our Grade Seven exams drilled us military style liberally slapping us into shape. Largely due to him literally cruised into secondary school. Fletcher High School, yes, the same Fletcher every parent was fighting hard (and paying hard) to get their sons into. That was where my problems with exams started.
For a start, I thought we were learning too many subjects for one to have any hope of passing. It would be too much for the brain to handle even though I later discovered that we use only 10 percent. I even wrote to my father to complain. He must have thought that I had truly lost it and that I deserved to be quarantined in freezing Gweru.
Competition at Fletcher was stiff. We had the Brighton Tiribabi’s, the Davidson Sveto’s and the Victor Serima’s. They could have been robots for all I cared. They made my life at school miserable as I found myself woefully inadequate in anything. At least I did not end up in an asylum like a couple of my colleagues.
By the time I sat for my ordinary level exams, I was confident at passing all of the subjects except maths. I hated the teacher and him likewise. So our mutual dislike for each other cost me a pass. The only thing we had in common was the love for the martial arts. He was a karate teacher and I adored Bruce Lee movies. That was as far as we went save for Pythagoras’ theorem and all those doodles.
I moved to Founders High School in Bulawayo for my advanced levels, largely because of my deficiency in Maths. It was a mixed race school with a large population of coloureds and Asians. At some point I even thought there were no exams written at this school. It was sports, sports, fun, sports and academics thrown in somewhere.
After pre-school, Founders High was the only educational institution where I looked forward to going every single day including weekends and holidays. It was a circus. I played rugby, attended and organised disco shows and luncheons...at school! We even had a few beers with some teachers because they said we were mature enough to know the consequences. They were wrong.
For all the shenanigans, the drama and a little debauchery here and there, I passed. Barely! But it was enough to get me to University. The University of Zimbabwe was a slightly different kettle of fish altogether. The chances of making it through were high... so were those of failing. The deal was for one to attend as many lectures as possible, all of the tutorials and to avoid annoying the lecturers.
But exams were dreadful affairs. That did little to stop people being desperate. Some slept with volumes under their pillow hoping that osmosis would take place...you know material moving from a place of high density (the book) to one with a lower density (the head). Or worse still the medical student who chewed a whole chapter hoping that the information would somehow be transferred to the brain via digestion.
University exams had their fair share of casualties. We used to call these perennial students. They never graduated into the world of work just because they could not pass the impregnable (for them) barrier of the exam. Some never finished college like Dambudzo Marechera who I met as a high school student while visiting the UZ in 1983 and I thought he was a professor or something.
Later as a university student I was to regularly bump into him at Harare’s Oasis hotel or the Students’ Union concluding that this dude was either too intelligent for varsity or totally whack. I was advised not to become too friendly because he had the tendency to come uninvited to one’s room and stay for good.
Sure it would have been good to have a celebrated author squatting in my room. But it was another thing having to share my shoes and underwear with him. Sure fame comes with a price, particularly when he attempted to burn down New College, Oxford. Now if you hate exams, that’s one sure way of avoiding them. Torching the university...
To cut a long story short, I passed university true to the adage: “We drink daily and pass annually!” And I am not proud of that. The moral of the story is simply that one does not have to go to extremes to pass an exam... any exam because it won’t work.
You may obtain leaked exam papers, or go to extreme of smuggling information into the exam room. No matter what you do, one thing is pretty certain. Examinations are a necessary evil. You just have to live with that fact.
