I really do care. We all do, even though a great deal of the time it does not look like it. I fully appreciate the amount of work that is needed to pass these exams. Every second of every day I feel guilty about the effort I put in, and nightly, as I drift off to a poor night’s sleep, I flash-forward to the dramatically hesitant opening of an envelope that will answer a question that’s been burning at our minds for two full years : Why am I doing this?

If you’re not familiar with the system of education in the UK, I’m currently studying for the final year of my A-Levels. These are worked on from 16-18, and in most cases, are required to get to university. Most notably, they’re hard. Surprisingly hard. They are a considerable jump from compulsory education and in their current form are designed to prepare us for the next step. Everything is about independent reading and learning out of lessons. It means that we’ve been doing research all year, so revision should not come as a shock. Yet for some reason it does.

Perhaps it’s the pressure. Maybe the persistent reminders that these are the some of the most important days of our lives are the reason that we feel overwhelmed. We’re not told that we need to work to do well, we’re told that we need to work to not fail. And that’s the wrong mindset. The constant threat of failure defies our natural need for a payoff.

In terms of revision, and the run up to exams, being told not to fail is being told not to improve. Getting a disappointing mark in a mock paper is frowned upon, when actually, it should be helping us. Marina Krakovsky, writing for Stanford, recounts a famous experiment:

Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students [previously identified as helpless] to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure—and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly.

I’m not saying that failure in all cases is a good thing. I can’t fail these exams, for example. But the threat of failure stops us growing, and drastically increases our stress. Indeed, we should be looking at how exciting the future could be and how to get there, rather than looking at failure as the end. That way, we can begin to enjoy our studies.