23 Oct 2020

Exams aren’t for everyone. Everyone (unfortunately) has to sit exams, but not everyone is good at them.

Some people just don’t click with exams at all.

That doesn’t mean that they’re stupid, though. It just means that they aren’t all that great at exams – which in the grand scheme of things means, well, pretty much nothing at all.

Sometimes, if you ask the guys getting 100% in English and Maths to draw something, they won’t be able to produce much more than a stick figure. Ask them to play music and they’ll have no rhythm, ask them to cook dinner and they’ll burn the house down, ask them to fix a bike and they’ll break the thing completely and end up walking to school instead.

Exams are just one way to measure someone’s knowledge. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line they got chosen as the main way to test someone’s knowledge at school, which leads to some of us getting left behind because writing an essay or solving equations isn’t what makes us shine.

And if exams aren’t your thing, it can be easy to feel stupid. Your school, your teachers, your parents, even your mates – they can all place such a heavy focus on exams that you can start to feel like your whole life depends on it.

If this is describing exactly how you feel, you’re not the only one. 

If you struggle to find the motivation to sit down for three hours and try to study something that doesn’t interest you in the slightest, that is perfectly normal.

Unfortunately, as long as you’re at school, there’s gonna be exams. All the way to your very last day of Year 12. If you’re gonna stick it out, then we’ve got a tonne of resources to help you out – things like tips on how to study, or what to do the night before your exam.

But if exams aren’t for you, then there’s a good chance that school isn’t for you.

Your teachers might not mention it to ya, but there are so many ways to get a job and lead a successful, happy life without even finishing Year 12. All an ATAR does is help you get into uni, and all uni is going to give you is three more years of exams.

Other education providers like TAFE focus on your abilities, your practical know-how and how great a worker you could be. They know that the ability to memorise a 3,000-word essay is not a good indication of a person’s value.

Maybe if what you had to study was something you actually cared about, you’d actually be keen to learn. Maybe you’d suddenly love studying, because you loved what you were being taught, and all your classmates were into the same things as you.