Exam Season
28 May. 2025 10:34
Due to my being 16 years old and in school, right now I have this horrible, horrible little thing called 'exams'. Months of sufferring. Guilt whenever I do anything that isn't study. Cramming the whole two years of Physics the day before the exam. Feeling stupid and worthless... Or feeling really smart and better than everyone else. I'm writing this rougly two hours before my second Portuguese writing exam.
For my whole IGCSE exam experience, I've felt really... underwhelmed, honestly. I thought the exams would be impossible, and I'd be studying 10 hours per day, and I'd be locked in the house, in my room, chugging coffee and energy drinks and whatever else they show in those montage scenes in the cartoons. But it hasn't really been like that... The exams so far have been really easy. The only one I really struggled with was Chemistry, because I made the smart decision of not studying for it at all. Art was also pretty difficult but for different reasons, namely perfectionism and self doubt and things of the like. Everyone around me told me my painting is stunning and whatnot but I just look at it and think it looks like shit, really.
I've always kind of struggled with those traditionally smart guy subjects like maths or science. Being shit at science is devastating for me because I love science... I think being in double science with a class full of dumbasses who hate everything made me hate science just a bit more. But studying for it has been fun. I always thought it'd be lame and boring and I'd hate it a lot, but it's genuinely really quite fun. Maybe it's cuz being somewhat good at anything makes me feel like a god. Maths, though, I'm really worried about. That's a subject I've genuinely always been shit at. Maybe during kindergarten and 1st grade I was really good at it, but the second multiplication came into play I stopped caring. Maths has always been the bane of my existence. I only really like graphs and probability stuff - but, like, the most basic stuff. Just to understand the extent of my stupidity, my teacher recommended me to take foundation maths. If you don't know what that is, it's like, the basic stuff. The foundations of maths, I suppose. Haha. But really. It's like - ok, I opened the exam paper and the questions were, like, "write 0.9 as a percentage" or "A group of Year 8 students...". I finished it an hour before everyone else because foundation maths and higher maths do the paper at the same time.
Other than art, the most fun exams have probably been History and English. Unsurprising, considering they're my favourite exams. I did make a really stupid decision in my English Language exam as I chose to do a narrative, meaning I had to write a story in like, an hour, and the story wasn't really that good. I don't know why - I've never seen the film in my life, I don't know what it's about at all, only ever read Tumblr posts about it, really - exam stress me thought it'd be a good idea to put in, like, a 2001: A Space Odyssey reference? Or at least, a reference based off my really small knowledge of the film... Umm... Not my brightest moment. I don't know if there's any, like, rules against plagiarism or whatever - I named the main villain guy, a vengeful AI program with no physical body, have the name 'SAL'. That's so dumb. I'm cringing a bit just writing that, sorry. The whole story just takes place in like, two rooms. The first two paragraphs are just explaining the AI and the background information and whatever about it, and the rest is just describing the programmer going into the lab after hours and being killed by the AI thing. It's... alright, I guess. I think I just wrote it cuz I was reading stuff about AI and ChatGPT use and whatnot on the train or uber ride to school. Whateverrr.
But, uhhh, yeah. I have my last two exams in a week. Then I'm free to go play Deltarune and watch Phineas and Ferb and celebrate my mother's birthday, and whatever else I can do on the days after or during June 5. I can't wait to see my results! I'll be expecting a page full of 2's and 3's!