Suck it up, princes and princesses. Modern SACE exams aren’t half as bad as they used to be | Peter Goers

Could today’s softer generation and their more tortured parents cope with what we had to, writes Peter Goers.

What fresh hell is this? Exams. There’s a word which casts terror into the hearts and minds of all.

The dreaded Year 12 exams kick off this week and good luck to all. Eagle-eyed invigilators will merrily invigilate.

In my day they were stern, po-faced retired teachers.

It’s a fascinating word - invigilator - and like proroguing (of parliament) or a conclave (of cardinals) used very specifically and rarely.

I digress. I digress for a living.

Exams are a cause for anxiety because they have to be.

For me, if an exam seemed easy it was often harder to pass and exams that seemed hard were often easier to pass. Is this still the case?

Thousands of Year 12 students (some of them in Year 11 which confounds me) will sit their exams and this causes them, their educators and their parents great stress.

Suck it up princes and princesses.

Contemporary Year 12 students are sitting exams which count for a maximum of 30 per cent of their subject result. Some subjects don’t even require exams.

Students concentrate at the opening sitting of University exams at Centennial Hall, Wayville, in 1957. Second from left in the front row is medical student and Sturt footballer Angus Ellis.

Year 12 students these days don’t know what real exam pressure looks like. Picture: iStock

Their courses are a comparative cakewalk of course assessment and research projects.

For prior generations the exam was everything - 100 per cent of the result.

It mattered not what you did all year. Five, three hour exams determined your future.

Could today’s softer generation and their more tortured parents cope with that?

So, I have compassion for those school students about to sit exams but only 30 per cent of the compassion I felt for those of my generation and those before – the one hundred percenters.

Some people are good under pressure and are good in exams. Some ain’t.

No-one actually likes exams and they are a necessary evil like the extraction of wisdom teeth. (As a teenager, I had all four removed in the dentist’s chair with rusty pliers, was given an Aspro and sent home on the bus. This generation has to go hospital for a week.)

The current examinees will sit in air-conditioned comfort, lubricated from their ubiquitous bottles of water and they’ll mainly use a computer.

The only computer we’d ever heard of was HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey which horrifyingly turned against people and had to be disabled.

We sat in foetid, hot exam rooms and we never drank water at all unless it was from a garden hose and tasted coppery or given flavour via Bobo Cordial.

We were probably allowed a slide rule – a useless and satanic device best used for swatting flies. I have never met anyone who could actually work a slide rule.

Thousands of high school and university students suffered exams in Centennial Hall which was invariably hellish hot, airless, with wobbly desks and the pong and miasma of hundreds of dead frogs dissected in the previous exam.

Having endured five, three hour Matric exams you then had to wait for that fateful day in late January when the postie delivered your results.

For both Leaving and Matric I did almost no work during the year but then swotted intensively in the “swot vac” before the exams.

I’d go and stay with my beloved grandmother who’d feed me as I crammed from 8am until midnight daily. This saved me and I still work only to deadline.

I did fairly in my Matric, one A, three Bs and a C which was good enough to get into my two chosen courses - drama at Flinders University and the inaugural journalism diploma at the Murray Park CAE. I declined the latter thinking I could never be a journalist which may well still be the case.

On my first year at Flinders, the students were revolting. Very revolting.

They/we occupied the Registry to oppose compulsory exams.

This failed and I sat a compulsory history exam in which some students set fire to their papers. That was the last exam I ever sat.

I did sit a test at a police station in the 80s for (inexplicably) a gun licence.

You had to answer a few questions such as “should you climb over a barbed wire fence carrying a loaded rifle?” If you wrote no, they gave you a gun licence.

We are tested throughout life and exams are a rite of passage.

We’d never heard of Schoolies’ week.

We finished our exams on Friday and went to work on Saturday – in my case at John Martin’s. The night I finished exams, I filched a bottle of (I blush to tell you) Spumante from my father and took it down to Grange Beach where my mates and I buried it in wet sand to get it cool and when the tide came in we lost it.

Maybe it’s still there.

Adelaide artist Rita Hall.

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