Results Day

It is finally here. The results day for my first bunch of GCSE students has been and gone, and they did pretty well. Congratulations, examinees! The only annoying part is that the Maths Numeracy paper scuppered practically every single one, garnering grades one rank lower than the mainline Mathematics paper. It's supposed to be the other way, if there's a difference at all... In any case, it seems highly suspicious, and I'm sure a huge load of re-marking is even now being requested of the exam board, whose name shall not be mentioned. However, we all know who they are...

It was a good results day overall, apart from that institutional snafu, with everyone hitting their targets in Mathematics proper. The tension is over for another few weeks now, before the next exam season kicks in. And then the next. It's a maddening system! Oh, why so many exams, exam board who will not be mentioned? Four exam sessions doesn't seem excessive at all?

Back in the old days, when I had to actually sit the exams instead of prepare other people to sit them, it was never a particularly tense day. At school, you would turn up and get handed a very unattractively shaded piece of paper with some titles and grades on it, and then you would just go back to your usual day. At university, you had to sign in and look at a badly designed web page. It was never very interesting or nervous, from the point of view of a confirmed idiot savant. It is only now that results day actually provokes nerves.

Well, that's not entirely true. There was one results day which was nerve-inducing, one examination process that couldn't be predicted. You have to feel nervous for your doctoral viva voce exam. It's impossible to not be so! That was a nervous day indeed, and not just because I had to go to London and do it there because of freakish scheduling!

In any case, it was results day, everyone made it through. Let's all be happy.

O.