Dear DU Examination Committee,
I love the concept of exams. It’s like: We don’t think you have enough things troubling you at this very formative juncture in your life when you’re a teen or a tween, lost and struggling, so we’ll just pile up a very dysfunctional and obsolete system of evaluating whether you deserve to get ahead in your life or not, based purely on your ability to cram, retain and reproduce. Thank you very much.
I started off this semester thinking there will be enough time to acquaint myself with the course. I had opted for a course that was fairly new to me.
Ideal Assumption: I will enjoy the curriculum and pace up with the other students, and now that I am finally studying something I love, I will excel at it.
Reality: The teachers rush to finish off with their units and I have no freaking idea when the first unit is over and then the others and the next day they announce internals on all the units. I am so confused because they tell me that one book has the first unit and another book the others and coming from a world where just one book worked for everything I am completely lost till the point of time where I convince myself that they are just internals, I don’t give a shit.
It has been only a couple of months since we started this semester and today when I go to college, all I see is people back counting the days left for exams and how to allocate time to study for the different papers. I perform a sort of self-laugh and I tell myself that I will have a much better idea of what to study and how to study by then.
Ideal Assumption: By the time I write my first examinations, I will have a good hold of concepts and I will perform well enough to be in the top scorers of the class like I have always been.
Reality: I am writing the internals paper and I have no idea where all the time is running out, no idea if I am answering the question or just writing away all I know because there is so much temporal pressure that I tell myself to breathe but I don’t think I have enough time for it and I again convince myself that it’s just exams, I don’t give a shit.
Apparently that’s what it all goes down to.
College is supposed to be a time of life when we are as lost as we can get. The underdogs that we are, we continuously struggle to become that someone we want to be. There is a plethora of opportunities coming in to grope,and when we do settle for something – an internship, a project, a startup – they just come and rub it in our face: EXAMS! If we are a part of cultural societies, we are doomed all the more. With a fest season all around the semester exams, we can’t help but give up on multi-tasking. Thankyou for reminding us time and again that there is nothing called all-rounder, it is all about priorities. But we like to think otherwise. Exams have ruined the lives of sports quota students the most. The game selection and training camps and inter-college tournaments never end, and when they do get time to breathe from all of that, they are asked about how they will study for the exams. My heart goes out to them.
If all that wasn’t sadistic enough, you have never failed to disappoint us with more. When pending assignments and way too much to study fails to make you give up on the world, attendance comes to the demise. I am a teenager circled with relationship problems, hormonal problems and underachievement problems but what I am actually supposed to care about is regularly attending classes, submitting assignments and if I am left with some little time, studying for exams. Because, yay life.
If Ebola and Summers fail to kill me this year, exams will. If you see, exams don’t even tell us how much we have grown intellectually or how well we are doing at college. All we get to know is how well we can sacrifice more interesting aspects of our life to score well because dear DU Examination Committee, you expect us to. I am obliged to you for a lifetime.
Yours sincerely,
Diksha Bijlani
An ambitious student.
