‘Expect the
unexpected.’ Well, we’re not going to just walk around expecting a giant piano
to fall on our heads or other extremely unlikely events to occur, but this is
decent advice for exams; or at least ‘be prepared for the unexpected’ is. I was
hit with some unexpected situations in high school exams. In our year nine
English midcourse, the teacher setting the Romeo
and Juliet section used an online quiz, which a friend and I had both used
to revise leading up to the exam. In my French Continuers speaking HSC, we
spent a few minutes discussing driving – which I hadn’t expected. My initial
shock was no doubt evident.
In general, questions
for the French Continuers speaking exam were rather strange. One person in my
class was asked about the difference between France and Switzerland, and then
asked about the difference between French people
and Swiss people when he said
that he hadn’t spent enough time in Switzerland (a day a year prior) to really
know. Another guy, who was also studying Japanese, was asked the difference
between France and Japan. One of the questions that we all did as practice, though
I don’t believe that any of us were asked, was “What makes a good friend?” (One
weird variation of it that we were asked was “Are you a good friend?”, which
was really awkward and I just wanted to answer it with “Je ne sais pas,
vous devez demander cette question à mes amis”.) (I don’t know, you should ask
this question to my friends).
There was no way
for me to know that I was going to spend a fifth of my exam talking about
driving, or for Tom to know that mentioning that he’d visited Switzerland would
open him up to questions on that front, or for our other classmates to know to
expect the other questions they were asked. But I, and while I can’t speak for
them probably they too, could have been better prepared by expecting a question that I might not be ready
for, by having told myself to keep calm and pause to think rather than to start
immediately and then to stumble a little over the sentence. So I guess the
point of this, for you and for me as a new uni student, is to prepare like
crazy (while sleeping well leading up to it, of course; I value sleep over
extra last minute refreshing) but to go into tests expecting to face a question
that will floor you and to have to work through it so that on the tests where
you do face that question, you can quickly accept it and work on dealing with
it rather than spending a minute despairing internally while trying to find a
way to get through it. So expect the expected, because a lot of the time what’s
expected is what will occur (we know that submerging ourselves in burning water
won’t make us feel cool and pleasantly refreshed, after all), but be prepared
for the occasional curveball.
