Hey Blog! Well, that idea of doing a post a day for the next week failed. However, I’m not going to let it fail entirely, and therefore will do one post a day for the next week – but several weeks late. Better late than never, as the saying goes!
Here’s the first one now.
This post is about how I do GCSEs and iGCSEs as a home educating child. You may have heard some of this before, if you’ve been reading for a long time, but here it is for the newer readers – plus bonus material never before seen outside my mind.
So, I had thirteen papers between my six exams this year. As I have no access to a school exam hall other than as a private candidate – which is very expensive, not often granted, and still probably inconvenient – we used an organisation called Tutors and Exams, which we found a few years ago. T&E offer sittings for almost every exam, and the most easily accessed centre of theirs is, for us, in Birmingham. I attended the opening of this centre, two years ago. There are three floors: the ground floor, which is for the invigilators to do their mysterious rituals to identify candidates, and the two upper floors, where we all sit to take the exams. I have used exam rooms on both levels, this year and the past two, so I’ve had both experiences. Surprisingly, it’s not that hard to make friends going into exams; this despite that “candidates may not communicate with, ask for help from, or give help to, other candidates. If you wish to speak to an invigilator, please put your hand up and wait for one to come to you” as I have memorised from the speech they do every time you go in. I’ve heard it thirteen times this year, enough to do that now.
The Invigilator Announcement is all pretty obvious. No devices, no technology, no books (unless allowed by the board, as some do – that would be lucky, because you can select any part of the text you like, but unlucky, because I’d just end up reading the book rather than writing the answers!), no talking, and no time. Or so it feels. Exams go very quickly, but thankfully I find the going in easy. Not if I’ve had time to think about it – it’s unnerving and makes lunch not feel like a good plan – but once I’m there, I’ll be fine. Morning ones are definitely easier to go to, but do have the drawback of needing to go down the night before just in case the trains aren’t running in the morning. Also because I’d need to get up at a ridiculous hour of the morning to get there on time, and it’s much easier if the hotel is five minutes round the corner. Whatever the situation, by that point, Mum’s probably (read: definitely) more nervous than I am.
During the exams, I haven’t had any issues. Basically, all one has to do is look at the paper, don’t look at anything or anyone else, concentrate, and if you don’t have an answer immediately think of all the variables you know and work out what else you can find with them first. There are some cases when I have found the exams a bit tricky, but I’ve never seen a paper which is unexpectedly hard or easy. The principle of starting from what you know works for English as well, with just an added pinch of creative flair. Imagination will serve you well in that, if you can keep your imagination under control – this was my greatest downside in the practice papers, because either I fixed on the first idea I came upon, without considering, or stayed to think of multiple ideas and then became paralysed by indecision, wailing about which one to choose. It was only in the last few days that I consistently began to both think of multiple ideas (the first one is always the one that everyone thinks of) and choose properly. And write well. If anyone could read my handwriting.
Now that I’ve finished all the exams – all thirteen sittings of them – and am into a free summer, I find the huge weight of study that has been there for four years, from the start of studying EM to the end of the Physics paper, has gone. I have forgotten what it’s like to not have things to do, but whatever it is, it’s not the same as just doing nothing, which is practically literally all I have done since. I really need to devise a plan for my future, and not just one in my head – one that others can actually read (mind reading not having been developed successfully by me yet, despite all this knowledge). More on that in the next post.
So here ends Fantastic Exams, for they are all taken. The final test I have to take is living life to the full, which doesn’t end this year. I guess that’s what I need to do with the rest of this summer!
