Exams, Pressure, and the Secret Formation That Saved Us

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Exam period always comes with a new mood for everyone, you will always see each student with different emotions clearly written on their faces, the happy ones especially those that read their books back to back, the ones with mixed feelings due to the fact that they don't understand what they even read and the ones who aren't bothered because they don't read but know how to sort themselves and still come out with good grades. I think I should join the happy clique, not because I read or understand the whole topics but just to give myself hope. I think the time I got scared of exams or when exams really freaked me out was during 100 and 200 levels and that was because I was still new to the school system and really don't know what they will bring out.

At some point, I do ask myself, why exams? Are they conducting exam because they don't trust us enough to understand what they taught us or they just want to keep testing us, exams are kind of boring and always with pressure but somehow I found a way around it though I wish we had AI back in the day to make things easier back then. During my school days, I didn't really have a notes because lecturers love dictating in class and at times, I do lose focus so I just listen to their explanations but I have this female friend of mine with complete notes, I usually call her "the serious one", and we form a reading group of 3 which is always active few weeks to exam but before then, we do read individually then come together to lecture each other during group reading.

One thing that always helped us and take away the fear was that we try our best to find past exam questions from our seniors so we can use it as guides and also we make sure after reading each topics they taught us, we draft out some possible questions which we do use as our "area of concentration" and it always worked like magic but here is the trick we do used. Anytime we have exams, we do use some formations during the exam all just like the 4 4 2, 4 3 3 formations they use in football, we all make sure we understand the questions we studied but there is no way you can know everything, so we split the questions into sections again and each of us took one section as our main focus. Then at the exam hall entrance, we would study the invigilator, if he is frowning, then he might reshuffle our seats, so we do sit in different rows but the seat would be in same line and we will make sure we frown our faces so as to look serious, 80% of the time, we escape reshuffling.

The interesting thing is, other groups usually did the same, so we do help each other, but I do make sure I don't sit with the obvious course mate that won't read anything but want to depend on you while you can't depend on them, I do tagged them "bad market".