Friday 31 May 2013

Exams

I haven't written in a long time. It's bad I know, especially considering my aim to put out at least one post a week, but i've been busy so haven't really put the time into blogging lately, despite the massive amount of things I could have written about.

I've been busy with my AS level exams. They aren't over yet, but i've had most of them by now, over the last two weeks. Half term just started today, and then I am going to have 3 more exams the next week, so soon I will begin to start writing more regularly!

I've had 6 exams so far. In the first week, the only exams I had were maths ones; a retake of an exam I took in january and another maths exam that I had been studying for since january. The retake didn't go too well, I hopefully did better than the last time (which I failed) but after that, when I began to prepare for the next maths exam that friday, I found that I had focused too much on the retake and done too little work towards the other maths exam. I tried my best to prepare myself, but it didn't really work out in the end. I attempted something along the lines of 35/72 marks on the paper, which is not at all good..
But I stayed completely calm during this exam, which was a miracle, considering I was going absolutely crazy in the retake!
This exam pretty much sealed my fate in terms of how well i'd do in maths. I thought maybe at most i'll pass with an E (the lowest pass there is at A level), but that's only if i'm lucky..
However, the worst for maths was still to come, the next friday.

That afternoon, I also had my only english exam. This did not go too well. I don't think I've outright failed it, partially because of the coursework I have done, but still, it went badly. The main problem was that I wrote too little. I typed (I can type because my handwriting is that poor, which is brilliant!) about a page and a half worth of words, which is terrible; I should have done roughly 2 and a half pages as a minimum. In terms of results, all I can do is wait, and hope.

After this week of exams, I then had to start revising for next weeks set of exams. There was General Studies, the chemistry retake that I was doing as I got a low grade in the January exam, and statistics.

General studies, cannot really be 'revised' and there is not much point in the actual exam, so that was no sweat off my brow. It wasn't too bad though, and I feel i've got an okay grade in it. The reason that there isn't a point in the exam is that most, if not all universities don't even take one look at it or even allow it to be used for UCAS points. In fact, a lot of the time, one of the first things you will find on their application form is: "General Studies is not accepted as a qualification" or something along those lines.
So that was a pointless exam, but the minimal amount of classes we had (1 hour a week) were interesting at times, as one of the sections we were studying for the exam was politics, which has never been of much interest to me, so it was good to get a look into a subject like that, which I will most likely never touch on again.

The next exam was the chemistry retake. This I was fairly worried about, not to the extent about the maths exam I had the previous friday, but still fairly uncertain how well I would do. In the end, I focused my revision on chemistry entirely and I feel that the work really paid off. I think the exam went fairly well and if I manage to do alright in the upcoming exam I hopefully should be able to continue it next year at A2 with a decent grade!

I am feeling quite worried about these three upcoming exams though, due to how close they are to each other. One ICT exam is on the monday that I go back, then the next day is my second Chemistry exam, then the final ICT exam is on thursday. The main thing I think i'm most likely worried about though is being prepared, which means doing quite a lot of work over the next few days.
The thing i've found is that i've spared the time to revise, by not going out much at all, except for a party on wednesday, but despite sparing the time, i've still found plenty of ways to distract myself..but I guess that's just the nature of procrastination; you'll do anything to keep yourself from doing the necessary work.