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December 06, 2000
Exams Suck.
This damn world is filled with too many exams. I'd say, the second most sinister form of exam (preceeded only by pap smears and breast exams) are the crappy exams that you take at the end of your college semesters which test every single inane and boring detail of a class which, chances are, you slept through anyway.
Ok, so maybe you didn't just slack off in your class. Instead, you spent the entire semester working your arse off in an attempt to grasp every single little specific concept covered. No matter how ridiculous it seemed, no matter how insignificant a vocabulary word or phrase was, you still sat there, staring at it, trying in vain to somehow pull the words off of the page and let it soak into your already-fried brain cells so you could finally move on to the next detail. Sure, you may actually enjoy the class and studying for it, but there's still something that always makes it difficult to remember any and all things covered by the professor. You're getting a good grade in the class. Almost perfect. All you need is to make a good grade on the final, and you grabbed the ever-elusive college A for the semester...then you think about that statement again...the final...the *final exam*...where all you learned throughout the semester is crammed within a single two-hour period, and you're expected to know anything and everything that the department yarfs on the pages which haunt your dreams while you sleep at night. In a desperate attempt to retain any and all knowledge, you review, and review, and review until your eyes sink into the back of your head, you chant spanish proverbs, and you start forming words such as "ducharse," "el novio," and "me gusta la clase de espanol" in your cold bowl of alphabet soup which you so lovingly refer to as "dinner". The night before the exam, you feel pretty good...you feel *damn* good...you know you're ready for anything they could possibly throw on that test. "Ha!" you chuckle, "this is going to be a piece of cake," and you sleep well that night, for you are now the sultan of spanish...or so you thought.
The day of the exam is now upon you. You wake up early in the morning; not because you feel refreshed, but because you have a headache and want to vomit. No matter, you know you can get over it, and still get some rest in time for your date with destiny. You pop a couple of Exedrine Migraine, and hop back into your soft, warm bed; knowing full well your exam starts in a mere five hours. You lie there; trying to go back to sleep as the pain in your forehead stabs your brain, and throbs like nothing you've ever felt before...concentrating on getting more rest. Since you're up anyway, you toy with the notion of opening your spanish book, and looking over a few things during the few hours you have left. "Naw," you say to yourself, "I'm ready. I'll just review quickly for a little bit before I leave for class. That'll be enough. I've got it down." So you lie there...and lie there...and lie there. You still can't sleep, but you lie there anyway because, hey, it's cold outside of these blankets. Finally, it's 9 am...just an hour and fifteen minutes left until you're flipping through pages, and conjugating -ar, -er, and -ir verbs; your last day stepping into that dull, dreary classroom. You get up, tell your boyfriend you love him, and will be right back; you're still not feeling too hot, so you decide to go to the cafeteria and get a glass of orange juice. You quickly put on the first clothes you find on your floor, your sandals (with no socks in the middle of a cold snowy spell), and run out the door. Racing to beat the cold which nips at your exposed tootsies, you dart into the building, grab your orange juice, and dart out once again since you want to not only beat the cold, but you want to talk to your boyfriend for a bit before he heads off to work, and review some of your vocabs before the final judgement. While drinking your orange juice, you notice nausea set deep in your gut. Figures. You took the asprin, and didn't even think about the acidic orange juice going in with it. Moron. Now you feel worse than before. Your head still hurts a little, but now you're dizzy, you're panting, and you feel like you're going to barf up your intestines...the worst part about it is that it's time for you to run to class. You grab your boots, tell your boyfriend you love him again, and take off for class. As you make your fifteen minute hike, your head freezes, and your jaw just absolutely kills from the cold. You normally wouldn't feel it, but since you already feel like complete crap (and are now shaking in anticipating your exam), you do this time. After almost passing out in the stairwell (oh why does your class *have* to be on the fourth floor of the damn building?), you half walk, half run, and completely cry down the hall to your classroom. You get in, and your teacher hands out the exam, explains it, and proceeds to give you a few minutes to prepare before he begins the oral comprehension sections. You go through, trying to concentrate completely on what your professor is saying, circling "cierto" or "falso" where applicable. Finally, you're on your own. First answer "yeah, that's easy!" you think to yourself...second "hey, still easy!"...third, "umm...uh oh. No matter, I'll just flag this, and come back to it later"...which is all well and good, except that this is a matching section, and you don't know the answer to another question. Now you're stuck with two choices...you know one means either one thing or the other, but you can't remember which means which. You take your best guess, and move on. Occasionally, throughout the exam, you have to flag questions which consist of vocabulary that you don't remember. When you reach the end of the exam before your final composition, you go back and hunt out the flags. "Hmm...more flags than I thought," so you give your best answers, and guess on the rest. A few bells ring and you know the answers...very few, but you give it your best shot anyway. You occasionally check the clock, and see more and more people handing in their papers, bidding the brown-eyed teacher a good vacation, and walking out with big smiles crossing their lips. Next thing you know, it's down to just you and one other person, and fifteen minutes. "Oh bloody hell" you conciously whisper out loud, causing the other girl to laugh, and the teacher to wonder what's going on to which you have to say "just talking to myself" to reassure him that you're not cheating (even though he *knows* you'd never do that anyway). Finally, the other chick hands in her exam, and you sit there frantically scribbling anything and everything down in your composition. "God damn, this sucks ass," you realize. You flip through the pages to see how many other flags you left in hopes of a sudden burst of energy from your brain, and then hand it in with no time left on the clock, thinking to yourself "well, that's as good as it's going to get"; wanting to say it to your teacher, but refraining as he talks about Aerosmith and how cool that tape you let him borrow was, how much he loves that era of Aerosmith (the hard-rocking '70's era), how awesome Joe Perry's guitar work during "Train Kept A-Rollin'" (coincidentally, his favorite song) was, and how he forgot to bring the tape back and didn't know how he'd get it to you. You tell him you'd like it back, but it didn't matter when since it was just some cheap compilation that you made a few years ago. You both walk out of the classroom where he follows you for a second, and says "there's somebody I have to talk to, I'll see you, ok?" You reply with "alright" and go off on your merry way; which is not so merry since all you do is think about how shitty you did on your exam.
You make it back to your dorm after the long trek, open your spanish book, and pick out some of the mistakes you made that you remember offhand (funny, you remember the mistakes you made after seeing them within a span of two hours, yet you can't remember vocabulary that you've been studying for damn near four months). Counting some of them up, you notice that you made *at least* about 20 mistakes...20 friggin' mistakes, and that's not even counting those questions which were worth more than one point...GOD DAMNIT! You worked so hard throughout the semester only to probably fuck up your grade completely because the universities in this world have a hard on for kicking your ass with a final exam. Now you're going to spend the rest of the day pissed off, but not able to do anything about it since the love of your life isn't going to be home from work until about five. You rant about how stupid you are, and about how pissed off you are; your roommate tries to calm you down, but you say "if the wrong person says hi to me today, they're getting punched in the mouth" to which she quickly backs away. Thus, here you are. Miserable, and ready to slap the living crap out of yourself for making such stupid mistakes. Why do colleges do this to you? It seems like it doesn't matter how much you learn; just how much you can cram into that little cranium of your's for those two hours of pure living hell at the end of the semester. Oh well, so you're not any good at your subject no matter how well you did during the year because that little exam at the end proves that you're a moron. So you're doomed to fail for the rest of your life even if you strive to do your best for the long term instead of just for the moment. Congratulations, you're a dumbass, and you wasted both time and money in this class. I hope you have a lovely winter vacation. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go stick my head in the toilet where it belongs.
Posted by ladyx at December 6, 2000 02:20 AM
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