A few words about exams. Real exams. GCEs.

These were the easiest times of my five years at Highbury apart from my days of truancy (for which I got caned and threatened with expulsion) and homework dodging. Let’s face it, doing schoolwork in school time was one thing, but after that, homework was an imposition on my social life that I didn’t take kindly to.

Anyway, back to the exams. Firstly, in those weeks in June, if you didn’t have an exam on a particular day, you didn’t have to go in. If you had an exam in the afternoon, you attended in the morning and played football. If you had an exam in the morning, you played football in the afternoon. Great days, but tough if you had exams both in the morning AND the afternoon.

The exams themselves usually lasted three hours each and, let’s face it, you either knew the stuff or you didn’t. Where’s the stress in that? You either spent a couple of hours writing stuff you knew, or you doodled for a while, and then asked to be excused.

As for revision, for the GCEs, I did about half an hour for French.

Of course, the exam system at the time required that it was all your own work. It was also possible to fail. Pass grades were A, B, C, D, E, and O (for ordinary level - somewhere between 30% and 40%). Fail grades were F, G, and H. Spelling and grammar errors were penalised in all exams. Calculators, other than slide-rules or logarithm tables, were not allowed. Your marks didn’t depend on whether or not the teachers liked you. (Mind, you, I can’t imagine most of our lot liking anyone.) None of this submitting your work to your own teacher to get it marked and corrected before submitting it for real. And none of us needed counselling to get through the days.

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