Memoirs of an Outstanding* Teen

Chapter 59: And It Begins

That last week before the beginning of the national exams, I gave it one last push. I combed through the math and physics formulas, and I went through my language notes, before settling down to revise through three years of biology notes, all while sleeping at least 6 hours every and exercising every day.

Biology was our first exam. As it often happens with national exams, you find out you needed to only study 3 of the 36 chapters you had.

On my English exam, I had a stroke of luck. Remember how they say the harder you work the luckier you get? For our English exam, we had to write an argumentative essay on a topic that we wouldn't know about until we got into the exam room. And usually, it would be a topic that requires quite a bit of research for those who don't have general knowledge about "the benefits of astronomy" or something like that. I had decided to do research on as many random topics as possible. Lo and behold, one of the topics I researched was genetic engineering, and there was a topic on genetic engineering on my paper!

My physics exam was challenging, but not impossible, one of those papers where you get to say, "I'm getting a good return on the time I invested studying and my brain is not being hopelessly minced." There was no question I got stuck on completely with no idea how to proceed. And when I checked my answers in the thirty minutes I had at the end, I was confident of the formulas I chose.

I thought my Afrikaans exam went decently as well. I chose to write an argumentative essay on technology, and I thought I wrote well.

Math was familiar. I had spent hours doing past papers, and for the most part, the questions in the exam were very similar, if not identical, to the ones I had already practiced.

On my computer studies exam, there was nothing that I hadn't studied and ticked off on my syllabus copy. There were one or two questions threw me off slightly with some strange wording, but I managed to recover.

Accounting was my very last exam. If you've done accounting in school, then you might know that there's quite a lot of balancing involved. You can pretty much tell if you've failed an exam long before you get the results, if your totals don't balance. There were some transactions I had to read several times before fully understanding what I had to write on my ledger or my statement. I had to cross out, and pencil in some numbers on some of my statements. But I was lucky enough to be able to say all my totals balanced when I walked out of that exam.

When I got home after accounting, and thought about how it all went, I had good reason to hope for the best. Then the waiting game began. It would be one month and 18 days before the results came out.