Failed Exams

Appeared in Volume 6/2, May 1993

A failed examination brings out the best in a student. A normally lacklustre, bleary eyed individualtakes on an almost evangelical air. He argues his case for passing the course with gusto and steely-eyed determination. All the rhetorical and analytical skills at his disposal are arrayed before the implacable enemy - you.

Mercifully, factual arguments are rarely deployed since the enlightened examiner (i.e. someone who has set an exam before) will have sweated for many hours to remove any potential sources of ambiguity from the paper. Even so, loopholes can spring from nowhere: the absence of `P.T.O' on the double sided pages of an exam will allow the student to justify why he only did half the questions.

A common excuse is illness: heart palpitations, dizziness brought on by the inhalation of correction fluid while correcting an answer, sympathetic unease caused by the stomach upset of the student's sister's boyfriend, back pains induced by sitting upright for two hours in the examination room.

A natural bedfellow is the death excuse. I'm sure many lecturers have wondered how many deceased grandmothers a student can accumulate during an average degree course.

A popular ploy is 'psychological torment': revision was impossible because of the late night disturbances from the hair dressing saloon next door, it was too difficult to adjust to the unrelenting socialising required by living in student accommodation, the responsibilities of having to wash clothes and cook baked beans for oneself proved too great a burden.

The 'powers from beyond' plea crops up every third and seventh years (probably due to astral forces). The bewildered academic is confronted with statements like: the `Singing Stone of Bushy Glade' ordered me to skip the exam, laylines running through the examination hall made extended concentration impossible.

A related genre of excuse (superficially more likely, perhaps) talks about 'unseen hands at work': someone replaced the scholar's paper with one of a depressingly poorer quality, someone added a powerful sleeping draft to the bottle of vodka innocently consumed the night before the examination.

If all of these feeble apologies fail, then the dejected neophyte will fall back on his last card - the truth: 'please give me another chance because I didn't bother revising', 'please give me another chance because I never attended any lectures', 'please give me another chance or my father will kill me'.

Andrew Davison