Exam results came out yesterday

and I know it is not the end of the world even if it seems that way for some students. The stress of this was made much worse because of an error in calculating the final result for a number of students, particularly the students in one school.

It might not seem like much and the error has since been rectified but imagine, if you can, what it would be like to believe you had done much less well than you actually had.  It has to be devastating. If you have really put all you can into something and have even been led to believe you have done well then a very poor result must be humiliating. 

All the students I gave a little help to have done about as well as I expected they would do. It is about as well as they expected they would do too. None of them are brilliant students but I believe I can honestly say they worked hard and did the best they could. I know the parents of one student will be disappointed but the student himself will not be. He does not wish to follow the career path his family had mapped out for him and I doubt he could do it. He wants to do something equally worthwhile and he has the marks to do that. I hope his parents will accept that too. He worked for his results.

There are other stories like this too, many of them. There is also the human error in calculating the final scores and much more. I told some of the students how our results were given to us. They were horrified. Our results appeared in the state newspaper for everyone to see. Even our teachers had to wait to see our results that way. Some students were permitted to go in to the city and pick up papers which were quite literally hot off the press. We were never allowed to do that.  

In our family we had to wait until the Senior Cat opened the paper which had landed on the front lawn with a thud. He did not keep us waiting long but we had to wait. We would watch his expression anxiously as he ran a finger quickly down to our results and then he would give a nod and we would know that everything was all right. He would read the results out to us and then breakfast preparations would take place as he read slowly through the results of all the students in our school. He would fill in pre-prepared pages and be ready to talk to disappointed students and parents. He would be ready to congratulate or commiserate, to give advice or warnings and much more. 

Such days were horrible, they really were. It did not matter how well or badly we had done those exam results days were no fun. The phone would ring constantly. The teachers would be in and out analysing the results. "Cat did well but what about J..." I can hear someone saying even now. I had received a higher grade than the girl who was supposed to be better at Geography than I was. It was not a pleasant sensation at all.  Would J... talk to me when she next saw me?

At university we all had numbers. We could guess who some people were of course but most of the time we had no idea. I remember my first year at law school. "The results are up!" someone shouted and people rushed off to read them on "the wall". I waited until the rush was over, indeed until my first year tutor came to find me in the library and say, "Go and look Cat. It's all right."  My results were far, far better than I expected but could not read my number on the "wall" at all. It was there of course but I kept thinking there was a mistake because law was so different from anything else I had studied. The following years were no easier. I can remember all this and wonder if it might be the same for students who have come from cultures where rote learning is much more common. Having to express their own ideas here is so much harder for them.

And now it will be a new group of students doing their final year of school in the coming year and we will go through it all again. It is not easy and I hope I won't ever forget what it was like.  Results day is not fun!