Leaving Cert Exam Papers

Who the hell invented exams anyway?

I’m guessing that exams didn’t just spring into being at the beginning of time, in all their soul crushing glory.  Somewhere down the line, some miserable aul sod must’ve seen a group of young people and thought to himself  ‘Bah, they’re all too cheerful, this will never do….I know, Iet’s herd them into a  room and force them to write down every bit of useless information they’ve gotten in their lives…..that’ll learn ’em!’  If I ever find myself in the posession of a time machine, first thing I’m doing is going back, finding this jackass and beating him soundly with a cane. Then, I shall lock him in some form of heavily guarded tower to ensure he doesn’t get to unleash his little brainwave on the general populace. Because, suffice to say, it’s grating on my last nerve.

The whole exam system just annoys me, the unfairness of it all.  I could work like a Trojan for the next 8 months, and if something goes wrong on the day of the exams, if I get hit by nerves or my pen runs out of ink or my  supervisor’s wearing a distracting sombrero, then that’s it. Finito. Game over,  thanks for playing. Enjoy your life sweeping up old man hair at the Turkish barber’s.   And all the useless, pointless, boring, irrelevant subjects we have to do. I haven’t a bog’s notion what I want to do with my life yet, but let’s just say for argument’s sake that I want to do Law.  How exactly is knowing the four stages of mitosis or algabraeic long division going to help me with that?  Is it so I can say to my clients ‘Sorry lads, I lost your case, but if makes you feel better, I can list the features of a Facist dictatorship for you?’ My point is, the Leaving Cert is a load of tripe. It doesn’t measure intelligence, or whether a course is right for you or not, it’s just a gigantic memory test.  There are plenty of people that can learn  reams of Irish notes of by heart, does that mean they’ll make good doctors? Hardly. As my Dad says, there’s plenty you can’t learn from books. In the big scary real world, actually, it’s probably better to have a little bit of personality than a photographic memory.

Sorry for the somewhat disgruntled post, it just bugs me that I have to waste a year of my life, a year I’m never getting back, memorising a bunch of useless facts and figures, trying to persuade them to stay in my head when I never cared to know them in the first place.  Leaving Cert year is like a blunt pencil….there’s no point.

Anyway, hang in there lads, happy studying and whatnot πŸ˜›

Adios!

7 thoughts on “Who the hell invented exams anyway?”

  1. ‘or if my supervisor’s wearing a distracting sombrero’ haha πŸ˜› ..or if ur supervisor is a weird old man who laughs at you when u ask for more paper! πŸ˜› lol u know what im talking about!

  2. Ohh, controversial (kinda)! πŸ˜› Tbh, it’d be worth a few grades to see an superintendent with a sombrero…supervising a Spanish exam.

  3. I COMPLETELY agree on the memory test theory! Like, it’s true, you don’t exactly need to huddle up and do rounds of differentiation and integration when there’s an important law case to be fought!! πŸ™‚ It would be easier if we could choose to do certain subjects, or indeed certain parts of subjects…but with a drunk for a Taoiseach I can’t see that happening anyday soon. πŸ˜‰

    Well done on the blog! I enjoyed reading it. πŸ˜€

    1. We’re learning to say what a drunk waste of space Brian Cowen is in Irish now actually: P
      Thanks, I really liked your blog too πŸ™‚

  4. Haha everything you say is right. You should be able to specialise in whatever topic your better at for a few years,then go on to college confident of it. We need a new leader… someone who understands the needs of the common agricultural scientist… Kitty for president! πŸ˜€

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