Exam Fever? Don't Stress. This too shall pass!

 [Published in The Telegraph's My Kolkata on 22 Jan 2024.  You can read the original article here]

[A former high school teacher and a just-done parent of three takes a light-hearted look at what’s on everybody’s mind and tabletop this month - exams! It’s serious stuff, though, so don’t stress too much.]

One of the most quoted lines about examinations was originally stated by Mr Tom Vianna, a rockstar teacher who was responsible for the success of thousands of young men back in the day.  Mr V is famously quoted as saying, “Treat the ICSE as a pleasant interlude in your learning journey!”  I’m not sure I got the words right, but the sentiment was clear: don’t bother yourself too much about the exams. And, true to this sentiment, his students literally breezed through the exams, having been there, done that a dozen times in class. There were batches of Xaverians who actually organised end-of-exam parties during the exams.  They passed chits around which had lists of what goodies each one had to bring to the party - much to the dismay of the invigilator who felt he had landed a whole class of users of unfair means!

MUMs, DADs and SADs

Switch to the present day.   Normal families get transformed to just three species Matter Unearthing Mommies (MUMs) and Data Addicted Daddies (DADs) whose sole effort is focused on the child, temporarily a SAD (Syllabus Acquisition Device). MUMs might spend long hours exchanging notes with each other so that their kids can get a 360 degree work schedule of sorts. DADs might spend hours downloading model question papers, preferably with answers, and feeding them to the SAD child who now has enough research for a doctorate in the subject. The Tutor adds yet another dimension to the ever-expanding problem of Exam Stress. The School is another pleasant interlude in this frenzy.

Come January and there’s a kind of hush all over the academic land. MUMs and DADs rearrange their schedules to be available as helicopters to ensure that their exam-headed kids (SADs) are transported from their books to the dinner table and back. Performance on paper is all that matters. Performance in other non-sedentary activities like sports is shelved for the moment, resulting in barber-allergic, unshorn, shaggy, button-popping, waistline-stretching, obese, academic monsters ready to devour the exams too!

Board or Overboard?

Those who are destined for the “Boards” - not the mortar boards, that’s still a few years away - are now in Phase 3 of the year that was. Phase 1 consisted of being reminded (nagged) that “this is the Board Year”. All parties, games, social media and movies stand cancelled. Phase 2 moved into higher gear of ‘finishing the syllabus’ at school and at home and perhaps even at the local tutorial. Many a student has been finished along with the syllabus.  Phase 3 is the preparation for the pre-Boards - a form of torture devised by schools to ensure that no one can enjoy Christmas, New Year or the nippy winter picnic. SADs in this phase are glued to their chairs and desks. Fancy calendars and time-charts are created and ceremoniously hung on pinboards to remind the SAD that there is still a Syllabus to be Acquired. Some schools like to refer to these pre-Boards in a flippant, less threatening term. They call them “Rehearsals” - reminiscent of the enjoyable first day, first show of a delightful dramatic production that will have people on the edge of their seats - a thriller by all accounts. The only thing they neglected to tell you is that the lines you rehearse may not be the lines you are expected to declaim in the Finals (another name for Boards). Curtain calls for some, curtains for others.

“Where do I begin …?”  

In another Love Story, this would have been the title song, but for our little SADs, this story begins long before childhood. Toddlers spend equal time in thinly disguised factories masquerading as “play schools” and in potty training at home. For both these activities there are no “exams”, only feedback.  “Your child managed to place all the blocks correctly” is balanced by “Clean diaper!  Good boy!” And the target objective is still the same.  Said child has to get into a good school without diapers and by the ripe old age of two. Then starts the cycle of passing exams, exam stress, fever and all the other symptoms.

There’s a crossroad in Singapore where the equivalent of a Board exam is held between level 5 and 6, called the PSLE - Primary School Leaving Exam.  Nope.  No one is leaving school just yet .. they are graduating from Primary to Secondary.  And it’s a toughie, I hear. Because you need to do very well to be allowed to choose a school for the next step in your academic journey. A person - probably several - actually took a whole three months of L-WOP (leave without pay) to get her child through the exam. 

In Kolkata we hear, as elsewhere in the country perhaps, there are points of entry at which schools actually induct new students - pregnancy, pre-Primary, Kindergarten, Primary, Secondary and Higher Secondary.  Each of these are preceded by complicated entry procedures, including admission tests. L-WOP doesn’t help with some schools where there is a matching fee Over The Table (OTT) and another UTT, at various points of contact from Darwan to Director.  So one can understand the need for performance stress once there is a financial investment - too bad the buck stops with the child. 

Love, Learning and Sacrifice

This year is particularly unhappy for examinees.  The exams overlap with Valentine’s Day (FOMO reigns supreme), which also coincides with Saraswati Puja (no books, good for examinees) and Ash Wednesday when Christians begin a period of sacrifice (no food, bad for examinees).  You soothsayers out there can make what you like of it - I haven’t checked phases of the moon or the stars though - and predict what might happen.  But through it all, those kids are going to be studying, and praying too.

In all this excitement, I asked my graduate son, “So, when are you planning to do your Masters?” No prizes for guessing his answer.  “It’s pointless,” says he. “I’m not going to study for exams when everything required at the workplace  is available from Google, ChatGPT and other resources”.  No one needs to ‘know’ anything anymore, leave alone spew it out on paper. He refuses to be a SAD.

So, let me end this brief examination of exam fever, with a small anecdote from my own dad. He hadn’t studied too high, but being in the airlines, 35000 feet was good enough for him. He had a healthy disregard for degrees. So when all the other parents were asking their kids, “How did you do in the exam?” -- actually, how did WE do as parents? -- he would ask us, “Will you pass?” And when we failed, he would quote the Bible. “This too shall pass!”