Training | 2009.06.14
Is this our final answer? | Jon Canter
In these testing times, our whole lives are graded. No wonder I suffer from exam anxiety
It\'s a hot day in May. You sit at a desk in a room filled with people sitting at desks. They all look just like you, except they\'re dressed and you\'re in pyjamas (or naked). The invigilator booms: "You may now turn over your paper." You turn over your paper. "What were the origins of the first world war?" Your mouth goes dry. You shake. This is history. You don\'t do history. You\'re here for a biology exam. For God\'s sake, you were up all night, revising the digestive system of rats! You hear a scratchy sound. You look down. Under your desk is a rat. It looks up at you and says "bad luck".
I\'ve had exam dreams of this kind for the last 40 years. They\'re harbingers of summer, like swifts or hay fever or men outside pubs, in vests, wetting their moustaches with lager. I thought that as my hair receded, so would the dreams. But the dreams persist. This isn\'t because I\'m an unusually anxious person – on the contrary, I\'m usually anxious – no, these dreams are a response to (literally) testing times. It\'s not just that my daughter\'s doing her GCSEs . Our whole lives are now graded, measured, performance-related, surveyed, assessed and Ofsteded. Everything\'s reduced to questions and answers, which is unnatural and wrong. Do you agree? (Or do you agree strongly? Or do you disagree? Or do you "don\'t know"?) When my phone rings, I\'m constantly told that the call is being monitored for training purposes. All I did was answer the phone and now I\'m in an exam.
And, just as in my dream, it\'s not even my exam but someone else\'s. Mostly, it\'s a young woman, asking if I\'d be interested in switching to a different energy supplier. She\'s polite, so I\'m polite in return. But wait. If she\'s being monitored, what\'s the point in my being polite? Anyone can deal with a polite punter. Her training monitors need to hear how she deals with a difficult customer. I should try to catch her out. I should be a bastard. I should think like an examiner.
A phone call is a small thing, so now let\'s go cosmic. Isn\'t the whole world currently sitting an economics exam, based on a syllabus we all believe to be rubbish? Surely, this is one exam where no one will get an A-star.
Mainstream entertainment brings no relief. On the contrary, everywhere you look, there are hyped-up, competitive, real(ish) people being feverishly examined. You just can\'t keep candidates off our screens. (Write your name at the top of the paper. Or if you think you have the X-Factor, just put an X.) It\'s as if these candidates are sitting one vast, conflated exam: they\'re all in a hellish kitchen in a multicoloured house in the jungle, eating giant ants – or is it decs? – in the hope Simon Cowell and his fellow examiners will give them a job as an apprentice chef in Sir Alan Sugar\'s production of Oliver!
Of all these examinations as entertainment, the cruellest but most brilliantly accurate is Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? "Is that your final answer?" asks Chris Tarrant. Instantly, we\'re back in that desk-filled room. Isn\'t that what we say to ourselves every time we answer a question? We sink into a mire of self-doubt. Is that it? Is that the best you can do? Are those really the origins of the first world war? Which one was the first, anyway? Was that the one with Hitler? On the screen, Tarrant pauses. And pauses. How long is he going to make us wait before he says if the answer is right? And still he pauses. If you take GCSEs, you wait weeks to find out the results. If you watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, you wait weeks. That\'s how it feels.
Damn it, those pauses seem longer than the first world war. Britain\'s got talent, all right: a talent for creating television programmes that are like exam hell.
One day, it will all be over. The life exam, that is. The American expression for dying captures it to a T. In the states, you don\'t pass away, you "pass". That\'s the one. I don\'t want to be a star, or even get an A-star. I just want to pass.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]07/exam-stress-cowell-x-factor
