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Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 41 No. 26. October 2 1978

A Few Quick Hints

A Few Quick Hints

Exams, as if you need to be told, are a hell of a business. We have it on good authority that General Sherman, who naively said "War is Hell", had never actually experienced University finals. The amazing thing is, it's not the exams themselves that produce this overwhelming desire in many people to swim out to sea, or hijack a DC10 to Nepal, it's the way you have been taught you must react to them.

Exams, because they are still, whatever your lecturers tell you, the assessment foundation of the entire NZ education system (that well-known endangered species) must be backed up by a well-organised structure of conditioning so that they may work effectively. Thus exams are as effective as the conditioning preceding them in each case: it people don't respond, if they saunter down to the pub in cold disregard for the traditional practice of living at desk 29754z on floor 5 of the library for a brief but intense period, then the exam system fails.

Unfortunately, this particular library-response is only one of the two most common reactions to exam conditioning. The second includes short-term alcoholism, child-bashing, paranoia, suicide, delusions of grandeur, and the molestation of little old ladies at night. In short, this is the group of people who respond to the cunningly calculated build-up of Exam Fever in their class by becoming thoroughly depressed and miserable without the actual additional response of the will to do any work.

It is these people this article is directed to, not those transitory. Casaubons whose excessive perspiration in the library testifies to their achievement of both levels of response. It must be admitted that these people are actually pursuing what is undoubtedly the rarest road to success-the safest way to be sure of passing is to sweat your guts out, to become a weak-kneed pasty faced little swot in high-wasted shorts with dandruff and pimples, and never get asked to dance, and most importantly, after it's all over and the holidays have begun, get sand kicked in your face by rugby players every time you go to the beach. But for those of you who aren't into that approach, there are other ways.