It’s never too late to learn lessons about exams
Even twenty-five years later, exam panic persists, a stark reminder that adulthood offers no cheat codes
I am studying for exams. Don’t ask. My friends with children are largely enjoying a brief reprieve from their offspring’s high school exam schedule that lasts roughly a whole Jurassic period. Other friends are on a WhatsApp group celebrating the 25th year since we were released with a bachelor’s degree into the world. Meanwhile I am studying for exams. A month into studying, it occurred to me that 25 years down the line, I am no better at studying for exams than I ever was. I have timetables, notes and piles of texts. I have sample papers. I have panicked text chains with seniors. I have seniors who are like, “it will be totally fine, babe" while I am like, “yeah, for you, maybe" while pretending to smile and agree. Like that old Tantra T-shirt used to say, it’s very “deja moo"—the feeling you have met this cow before.
I still don’t know how to “crack" exams. I only know that I am not cracking it. Here I don’t mean exams like the truly baffling phenomena of the notorious NET exams, which in a gender studies paper might ask you about Beijing’s air quality index. I mean ordinary exams for which thousands of people make reasonable equations between the amount of work they put in and their marks. Work this hard and do this well. (Give or take an exam paper scam and/or a system that energetically marginalises as many people as it possibly can from education.)
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Back when exams were a central feature in my life, I didn’t know that I was going about it all wrong. I just assumed I wasn’t studying enough. And no one told me differently. It was in class XII when I was nearly failing calculus after spending most of my waking hours on it (thus ensuring that I was nearly failing other subjects too) that it finally hit me. After a term of doing hundreds of calculus sums, I would arrive at the examination and discover that I could solve nothing, “solve for" nothing. Something about the nature of calculus doesn’t respond to the hours of jaws-clenched labour. That’s possibly the only thing I learnt from math that year. I also learnt a few months later something about my father. I spotted my sneering math teacher in a public place and reported this to my parents. My father turned to me and said, “Do you want me to go over and punch him?" A 17-year-old would be hard pressed to find a more solid offer of solidarity.
Here is the thing though. I never extrapolated that fleeting insight about calculus. I went on to do moderately badly in my college exams. Every time I saw an exam paper, I was shocked that so many questions shocked me. Hadn’t I studied? I had. And yet. And yet, I was staggered by a 10-mark question about the IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) in my economics paper. I remember that feeling vividly. I was more shocked than the girl from my batch whose pen was stolen by a monkey who hopped through the window into the exam hall and then hopped out faster than the human eye. (Her examiner, who was from another college, didn’t believe her.) I was more shocked than my friend whose examiner wandered up her aisle, stood next to her and farted in boredom. Ten marks! On the IBRD! Why?
That feeling came back vividly to me last week when I was doggedly making my way through my schedule, my notes, my sample questions. I had recently given gratuitous aunty advice to a friend’s son who was preparing for his class X exams about scheduling and planning his study sessions. I was in charge of my education unlike when I had calculus and accounts and Hindi. Then a friend asked in passing whether I had a plan to answer a certain question. As soon as she said it, I was shocked—at an IBRD level—at myself. It was the most obvious and likely question to appear in the exams. I should have anticipated it. Why hadn’t I? I had checked out so many books the previous day from the university library that the young guy at the desk joked (only half-joked) that I should have brought a shopping cart. In Mahabharat, Arjuna saw only the eye of the bird in his examination. I somehow had been taking notes about the tree that the bird was sitting on. In the words of Cher Horowitz (Clueless), a heroine from my brief and wondrous life before calculus, “It all boiled down to one inevitable conclusion, I was just totally clueless."
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Since that moment when my innocent friend asked me that question about question papers, I have been trying to squint at the bird. The eye of the bird feels ambitious. Can I learn how to study for exams? I am beginning to suspect it is an empathy gap. I am unable to imagine what a reasonable teacher would think is an important question.
I rewrote all my study plans, sighed and started again. And here is the thing. On the edge of the frame of a photo shared in that 25th reunion WhatsApp group was a version of me in my signature blue waistcoat, big glasses and bigger grin. And that version somehow went to every exam believing that this was the one she was going to crack. As I still secretly believe. And as Cher Horowitz reminded us, it was that Polonius guy who said, to thine own self be true.
Nisha Susan is the author of The Women Who Forgot To Invent Facebook And Other Stories. She posts @chasingiamb.
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