Wednesday 13 June 2012

Got Screwed Over Again and Ranting #5

When I got my exam timetable I must admitted I was pretty pissed, my last exam was so far away. I thought I'd sitting around waiting for the exams to come along
When I got my exam timetable, I must admit I was pretty pissed. This Summer I only have 4 exams (compared to last year's 7), with 2 at the start of the exam period, 1 in the middle and 1 right at the end of it. I thought I'd be sitting around waiting for ages for the exams to be over.
That's partially true; all my friends finish before I do and it still feels like ages before I finish secondary school indefinitely.
However, after today I'm pretty grateful that I still have over a week to prepare for my last exam. I realise that I know nothing about biology.

Anyway, in January I sat the Salter's F334 paper which was possibly the hardest chemistry paper I had ever done. Everyone came out feeling so annoyed and angry at the examiners. Half the specification wasn't even in the exam (there was nothing on proteins or anything throughout the whole paper) and it was literally all the physics-y bit of chemistry that I hate.
The class nerd, who has a habit of being arrogant, said that it was an easy paper, which I wanted to smack him for - he must have sensed that everyone was getting annoyed at him and quickly found that it would be best to shut up.
The exam results come back and it turns out that most of my class (my class are pretty bright) ended up with C, D, E, U grades. Only 4 people in our year (out of 30 odd taking chemistry) got As when normally at least 12 would. Thankfully, I was one of the lucky ones and managed to get a decent/high A. Thank God for low grade boundaries is all I can say...
What was even better is I beat the nerd which he was, visibly surprised about. Heh, it felt so good.

So today, I sat the Salter's Chemistry F335 exam today - what a freaking nightmare.

So I open the test paper and the first question is fine, nice and straight forward. I was thinking that this was going to be a nice paper and I keep thinking that until I turn over to question 2, when the examiner decides to thrown in some crazy questions.
Question 2 was basically a time drain for me. I must have spent at least 20 minutes staring at this stupid molecular formula, racking my brains trying to work out the structure. In the end, I made it up and moved on (turns out I made an intelligent guess since my teacher thinks I got it right).
The exam continues to screw me over and I come out feeling pretty annoyed - for that paper there wasn't much revision wise that would of helped me. OCR should have just told us not to bother revising because our time would be wasted on this exam.
I asked a couple of classmates what they thought and it seemed like a pretty mixed bag - of course the class nerd said that it was pretty easy, but I am not so sure. Maybe history will repeat itself and I'll get a better grade than him.
My teacher said that from thestudentroom's forum on the exam, the general consensus was that the exam was... shit.
Everyone was complaining about having two awful chemistry exams this year and it was as though the examiner who wrote January's paper also wrote June's. Why screw us over AGAIN?!
After I got home from school I logged on to thestudentroom to checked out the forum and this was a BAD mistake. I flung myself back into self-doubt, questioning whether what I wrote in the exam matched the answers of the posters. I am never going to read post-exam forums anymore. What a stupid rookie error.
But at least the majority felt the same way. The grade boundaries will hopefully be low...
I feel kind of bad complaining about this exam because I know that I'll have to fail pretty spectacularly to miss my uni grade for chemistry. That still doesn't stop me feeling bitter about the exam because I would really love an A*, which now seems out of reach. I know a lot of people are depending on this exam and I can only hope that everyone gets what they need to do what they want to do.

I don't mean to come across as arrogant if that's how I am sounding, but I didn't revise for weeks just to flunk this exam.

So the rest of the day I decided to have a lazy day. Normally I'd do nothing on these days, but I don't want to fall back into the vicious circle as mentioned before. I tidied and hoovered my room (crazy right?!) and helped my sister revise (I do owe her one for helping me with my chemistry flash cards ;)!!)

I can't believe I've got sucked into this Euro 2012 business too - I'm rooting for Germany even though I should be supporting England. I don't even like football...

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