An Ode To My Favourite Exam Question

I imagine most people would agree that exams sucked. They were stressful, it was far too quiet, and it was built up as though they would define your life. Thank god they didn’t. Most of the exams didn’t anyway, like I remember spending most of my time remembering the exact measurements of something and less about what I was actually writing down. Exams tended to be more of a memory test than a knowledge test. I do remember though, the best question in exam history. The one that appeared and always filled me with a weird amount of joy. The one that would essentially define who I was.

The question was usually in the English Language paper, and it was the last one. It usually had an image, and it would say something like “Write a story about this picture or prompt, worth 40 marks”. This question alone was worth half of the entire paper’s marks and it was unbelievably simple. It meant that you could essentially write whatever you wanted as long as you linked it back to the picture or the prompt, even just once. Simple and unfiltered creativity was being tested here, not memory, and I loved it.

One of my favourite parts of this question was getting to see how far I could take it. I remember one prompt said “write a story in which the weather was involved” so naturally I wrote the beginning of a huge post apocalyptic epic in the style of Game Of Thrones where weather was mentioned in the first few lines and then never again. Was it as good as Game Of Thrones? No, I don’t think it was. But was it fun? Of course it was. It felt like the time in that exam breezed by when I was writing this. That should be the case during an exam, those feelings are what should be invoked when I’m handed a paper. I imagine that’s an ideal world, we get handed exams and light up internally at the possibilities. This is also far too hasty, in my opinion, for a young teenager who has no idea what they want to do with the world. 

I could go on a ramble about how weird the education system here couldn’t I? I find it so fascinating and so unbelievably stupid that we are supposed to know what we want to do in our lives when we are as young as sixteen. Then again, that’s an issue that’s been repeatedly mentioned for decades. I will just leave this article saying that I’m glad that question in the exam paper exists and still hopefully appears. I’m thankful that for one brief moment in a horribly, anxiety-inducing few weeks, that I could find peace and comfort in writing a story back then. It’d be nice to keep writing stories in the future too.