Assessments galore

It's that time of the semester when it feels like all your assessments come at once. Exams, quizzes, assignments, all rolled together into a huge slavering beast which buries you under a hail of marking schemes and percentage markings. Professors from all faculties join forces and plot, cackling with glee, to make sure that you have to do everything all at once. All over campus, students can discuss nothing else but what a long essay they have to write, or how many exams they must sit. The library staff suddenly have three times as much work, as the entire Arts Faculty descends upon them in a last minute rush for research material, students progressing to more and more obscure books in the desperate hope that something in them may prove the key to boosting their mark to a Distinction.

I, on the other hand, have a different tactic. Sensing an exam or a due date rapidly approaching, my brain does a curious thing. It does not like stress, you see, so when it recognizes the approaching deadline as the source of its discomfort it panics and tries to purge the offending thought. That is to say it thinks about anything but the exam, preferring to focus instead on some other form of distraction, such as writing blogs, and thus put off thinking about anything nasty until it can do so for the least possible amount of time. That is to say, immediately beforehand.

However, whatever your tactic for dealing with the horrible time that is the end of semester we are all in it together, so let us join in feeling stressed and panicked and celebrate the end of a wonderful half-year. Remember, in a few weeks we can put it all behind us and totally forget all about it until the same time next semester when it will all come flooding horribly back.

NB - I have it on fairly good authority that my mother peruses this blog once in a while (indeed she is probably the only one, everyone else preferring to do something more interesting like, say, look at their toes, or make friends with a small piece of lint). If so, I would ask her kindly to not read the second paragraph of this post. Thankyou.