After two years of coursework, homework and pretty much every other kind of work possible, followed by months of blood, sweat and revision, followed - finally - by the fear and tears of the GCSE exams themselves, I can sit back and await the crushing disappointment of finding out on Thursday that I didn't do that well after all.
But as it turns out, according to most of the country's media, it was all a big waste of time anyway. And it was easy, apparently. Sitting in a very hot exam room, eyes streaming with hayfever, trying to write coherently about the Liberal health reforms at the turn of the century (something I didn't even know was part of the GCSE syllabus until a week before the exam) is too easy, they say. But last year around 5% of all GCSE students failed to pass a single exam.
There are few things more important than getting good GCSE results, and one of those things just happens to be getting good A-level results. Last week's plan was to get bright kids to skip their GCSEs and move straight on to AS-levels. This is the kind of plan that I would naïvely have thought a good idea at the tender age of 14. I would have picked a bunch of subjects that I am not actually very good at, and proceeded to fail all my exams through lack of practice.
Furthermore, I would have been cut off from all my friends and surrounded by people taller, brighter and more, let's say, "chemically experienced" than myself.
Yes, there are lots of problems with GCSEs, but pretending they can be easily skipped is really not going to help. For a start, those 11 or so letters you work so hard for do actually mean something in the wider world - no CV should be without them, for example. More importantly, the long hours and the scary exams and the coursework deadlines (which make a lovely whizzing noise as they zoom by) give you the practice required to deal with AS-levels.
But that is not the only reason why moving so-called bright kids - whatever that means - straight to AS-levels is a bad idea. At the age of 14, I had just finished my Sats, and had the intellectual diversity of one of those green things living at the bottom of my grandma's pond. I had never written an essay in my life, my knowledge of world history came mainly from watching Knightrider, and my knowledge of geography from the Simpsons (where is Springfield?).
I would have had no idea what AS-levels to choose, because I had never actually done any of the subjects I was choosing from. I would probably have chosen something really stupid, like maths.
But yes, there is some - and by some, I mean a lot of - lingering resentment among teenagers about GCSEs. If you were to take away the swearing and the bad grammar, and infuse a little public school into the conversations my friends and I have on this subject, you would probably hear "I think that the current system is far too exam-based" in there somewhere. And to be honest, it's true.
I'd like to say at this point, before you start drawing up reports and disbanding exam boards and creating "three-year plans" (yes, that means you, Charles Clarke), that I'm not proposing anything radical. Just a gradual shift, over a number of years, to a more coursework-based system, would make me happy. Perhaps some subjects, especially English and music, could be entirely based on continual assessment. Just a thought.
Nobody revises just the right amount for their exams. Kids either bury their heads in the sand and pretend the exams are one long terrible dream that they are sure to wake up from (and subsequently do no revision and fail); or, like me, they do way too much revision, and stupid things such as cancelling holidays to Italy against the wishes of their parents. It is this exam pressure that helps turn us into the quiet, dysfunctional members of society that we have the reputation of being.
Because the drama of our GCSE exams was contained in one month in 2003 - a date that, back when we were doing coursework, seemed so far away (sigh) - the idea that this essay/composition/ experiment/Roman villa actually counted was very hard to believe. Lots of my friends didn't believe it, and treated it like a normal piece of homework, something to be ignored and lied about.
But perhaps all this media fuss just before the exam results is a good thing. Somehow, all the hype about how futile GCSEs really are has a soothing effect. Maybe if I believe it was all a lie, and that GCSEs don't actually matter at all, in a few days from now, I'll be less inclined to pack my bags, run away from home and spend the rest of my life living underneath a rock in Sweden.
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