It’s never too late to learn lessons about exams

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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.) 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)