My Experience with Exams: Revisited

I am writing this follow on post around two years after I published my last. I find it strange to re-read my thoughts after going through a set of A-Level exams. Whilst my thoughts on the pressure put on young people to achieve 5 GCSEs is the same, I now understand that GCSE results do not make or break you. You can still achieve great things even if exams are not your thing. 

A Levels opened my eyes to a new kind of pressure, made up of both the environment I was in as well as the newfound pressure of my own expectations. One of the biggest difference between GCSEs and A-Levels is that you are your own motivator. You are expected to want to do well and that you will put in the work needed to get the grades you require for your next stage of life. This new desire caused me to become increasingly stressed and disappointed when I wasn't making progress during A levels.

 As much as I got the grades I needed to progress onto the University of Southampton (the dock pictured above), the stress I endured was almost too much. However, unlike my previous exam experience in which I felt like I did well, but whatever grades I got wouldn't have had too much impact on what I could go onto do at college, I felt a great sense of achievement and fulfilment at the end of A-Levels.

I know I was very fortunate in my position in which I achieved highly and got into a Russell Group University, I know others were not so fortunate. This is where I feel I have a little predicament as I did achieve well and was supported well by the education system, however I do feel that it is flawed. There is a high sense of pressure put on young people to choose subjects that, at the end of two years, will provide the foundation for either further education in the form of University or Apprenticeship or for a career. At the right old age of 16, how do you expect young people who are still developing and highly influential to make a decision about the whole of their future. 

Similarly, I was apart of the first cohort to go through fully linear exams, meaning that at the end of two years going into my exams, I had only completed two pieces of coursework, meaning that the overall grade of my A Levels relied on 7 exams that I sat in a two week period. How does this reflect two years of knowledge and skill development? 

These two points really kind of highlight the most significant flaws of the higher education system. But do I think this will change? Unfortunately, no. The way that the education system is currently structured makes it very difficult for their to be flexibility amongst colleges and sixth forms, meaning that for those who do not fit the conventional routes of A-levels, vocational courses and BTECs, and their proposed follow-on, there is not the correct support in place. 

I therefore believe there needs to be greater emphasis on the negative effects that education has amongst people as well as how conventional routes will not suit everyone. Hopefully, change is on its way, and this change will hopefully will be good.