School, Exams and Qualifications

Story · all 20 words

The Cold Library

In my final year I spent two months in a library that was always four degrees too cold, and I still cannot smell radiator dust without feeling slightly anxious.

There were four exams in nine days. I had to sit all of them in the same room, at the same desk, with the same clock that I am convinced ran slowly on purpose.

My revision plan was a work of art. I drew a timetable on a large piece of paper, in four colours, with a box for every hour of every day. Making that timetable took an entire afternoon, which I counted as work. It did not survive contact with the first Monday.

What actually helped was much simpler and much less beautiful. I stopped trying to revise everything and started with the things I understood least, which is uncomfortable and is the whole point. I rewrote my notes by hand instead of reading them, because reading feels like studying and is not. And I worked in fifty-minute pieces, because I cannot concentrate for longer than that and pretending otherwise had wasted about six years.

One course nearly finished me. Statistics was compulsory for my degree, I had missed four lectures in October for reasons that seemed excellent at the time, and by April I could not follow a single page. In the end I paid for four hours with a tutor, who found the exact thing I had misunderstood in about twenty minutes and then explained everything after it in ninety. I have never regretted money less.

The essays were worse than the exams. I had two to hand in during the same fortnight, and I wrote the second essay in a state that I would not describe as thinking. It came back with a comment I have kept: You clearly know this. Now say it in the right order.

Two people in my year were caught trying to cheat and were removed from the whole term. Nobody had expected either of them. I have thought about that more than I expected to.

The results came out in August, on a website that crashed for forty minutes while several thousand people refreshed it at once. Mine were better than I deserved in one subject and exactly what I deserved in the others.

I graduated in a hall that was too hot, in a gown that did not fit, next to a man I had never spoken to in four years. My mother took eleven photographs of the back of my head. The certificate is in a drawer and I have needed it exactly twice.

The person I actually think about is a girl in my year who arrived on a scholarship with almost no English and finished third in the whole department. She did not do anything clever. She simply worked every day and let herself make progress slowly, in a language that was not hers, while the rest of us panicked in ours.