Woohoo!! My last GCSE exam was today. I am immensely glad that it's all over. "High"lights include:

  • My School gym - possibly the worst place to take an exam. Ever. The floor is sprung, which is good for gym, but immensely bad when teachers are walking round to see if you're cheating and you hear this CREEAAAAKKKK! I swear that you could cheat if you wanted, because you get such good early warning of their approach you could hide your revision notes / mobile phone / Portable TV in time.
  • The excellent feeling you get when watching the head of exams realise that he had let us carry on too long. He was looking at the clock, and I could see it was 15 seconds after the end of the exam. He hadn't told us to stop yet. He kind of leaned over and stared at the clock, for about half a minute, and you could almost see the cogs turning. Finally he realised, when people had had about an extra minute, and says "Right, stop writing" while hoping no one had noticed his mistake.
  • The head of exams and his "great" technique for talking. It generally involves calling people "Mr. Reynolds" when every other teacher calls me Malcolm, and randomly calling me "a bit of a rebel" because I had my tie tucked into my shirt. And, every time he reads out the regulations, he elaborates on them. Because no matter how many times I get told that a Mobile Phone going off will get me banned from exams, I always forget the next day! It's like this incredible concentrated amnesia! It's a good thing he takes hours explaining this every day, else who knows what could happen.
  • Ahem. </sarcasm>
  • Watching a kid who I really, really, don't like* reading his paper for a decent amount of time after we had to stop and close the papers. I would ring up the exam board and get his results cancelled.
  • Watching another kid who I really don't like* turning up late looking bewildered to almost every exam. The ones he was here on time for, he managed to miss his name being called out. Although I'm sure he has a glittering career as leader of the NF ahead of him, so no problem about missing exams...
  • Trying to get through my last exam today without getting distracted by the incredibly loud group of townies talking outside (presumably about souping up their 1.4 Novas and drinking cider). The teachers seemed oblivious to the noise, and eventually another student asked a teacher to sort them out. He proceeded to do so, making double the noise they had made in the first place. Authoritah 1, Sensibility 0.
  • Sitting down to an exam and finding that my whole row had no paper. That wasn't so bad, but no teachers seemed to bother to sort it out particularly quickly..
  • For some loophole or something I don't quite understand, we got let out of the GNVQ ICT exam before the end, because we had all finished. Hey, for all I know we broke the regulations, but I don't care...
All I can say is, thank God it's over. And now, my friends, I am going to get drunk. A lot..
* - I'm not just a really nasty person, they deserve it. Trust me.