My inactivity on my website and my laziness towards actually making it look better is justified by the fact that it’s exam season, and I do the IB diploma program. It is very rigorous, they torture you with the exam, the exam board itself is…very questionable, and I have to do 6 very heavy weight subjects, all with coursework.
Math
I picked the hardest math that the IBDP (or just the IB) has to offer, Higher Level Math: Analysis and Approaches, or just HL Math AA, or HLAA. Analysis and Approaches means that it has more pure math content and less of the weird statistical graph theory geometry stuff that Applications and Interpretations has to offer. It’s also because universities love HLAA students, especially for Computer Science.
In the final exams, you are given 3 papers, paper 1 being non-calculator, paper 2 being calculator, and paper 3 being the super abstract wack paper where they throw you some random concept in the field of mathematics, a short text describing how it works, and then expect you to answer a bunch of questions on it.
Today was the day of my math exam. It’s just a semester exam, the first one in fact. It tests you on 6 months’ worth of content, and it goes to your IB DP predicted grade (at least here in my school), which is sent to universities as a part of the application process. We are only given a 1 hour long paper 1 and a 1 hour long paper 2 in the same exam room, where you put your calculator on the floor face-down for the first part.
I prepared a hell of a lot for it, 12 past papers (6 paper 1’s and 6 paper 2’s), and two fat calculus worksheets (300something marks in total), and some textbook questions. I felt pretty confident until I left home. I remembered that the exam started at 12:45pm, so I left home at around 12:00 pm, so that I could have some time to breathe at school.
The lift of realization
I went in the lift, going to put my exam timetable in the favorites folder of my phone’s photo gallery. I look at the time stated where the exam would begin, just because I wanted to make sure that it did start at 12:45…
whoops, it actually starts at 11:45am.
Don’t ask me how I didn’t check. It was 12:03 in the lift, and my mind started racing before my heart could catch up. Oh shit, oh shit, I would be late.
As I cycled to school, my mind raced with all that could happen in the exam. Would I get the full 1 hour for paper 1? could I sit the exam alone, or would I have to join everyone else? The cycle was insane, I never cycle on my bike’s max gear, but I did, for the whole journey. I live quite close to the school, so I just had to churn out all the power that I could through my legs into my bike. I got stopped by 2 red lights, the last of which was near my school, where my mom called saying that the secretaries wanted me to go to the 6th floor (the floor of my school where the high school office was. Whoops. I was cooked. That was 12:09.
I reached the office floor, where I was greeted by the timetabler. He was the one in charge of escorting students who are late into exam halls, and I bumped into him just as he was walking into a lift. He told me to come.
The exam hall
Pin drop silence. That lift ride was hilarious, he asked me how long I’ve been in the school for, and kind of very slightly ridiculed me for mistaking 11:45 for 12:45. IGCSE Exams did in fact start at 12:45, but oh well. At the door, he told me to just go sit in the far corner by the window, and just start writing.
I ducked and speedwalked to my seat the moment I entered the hall. It must have been after 12:15, because I remembered that I had 40 minutes to sit the paper. Apparently, they actually started the exam 10 minutes late, at 12:55. I don’t know if they were waiting for me. If they were, thanks to them, because that meant I would have only missed 20 minutes worth of time (I did) and not 30 minutes.
I almost threw my calculator on the ground and I just started writing my paper 1. I was severely dehydrated and both my legs and butt hurted from that cycle. The invigilator put my bottle on a table out of arm’s reach. Thanks.
The questions started flying off the pages, it was as if the whole world was in slo-mo as my 160bpm+ heart supplied the side of my brain panicking to calm it down and the other half who actually had to sit the paper simultaneously. The equations started levitating off the pages; I couldn’t think of anything but the paper. I didn’t even lay my eyes off the pages. For one of the questions I got confused as I got a really really weird fraction, whereas the question asked for an integer, but I just pressed on.
I ended up finishing paper 1, the entire thing, and fixed 2 questions where I knew I went wrong. Phew, that was surely crazy.
The rest of the exam
I still had to sit paper 2. The adrenaline still pumped through my veins, I couldn’t even comprehend where I was, physically and mentally. I finally had access to my water bottle since it was during the time between the two papers, where we had to grab paper 2 and our calculators off the floor. I just did the paper, I was in a state of hyperfocus, albeit calmer than when I sat the first paper. The questions seemed far easier than I thought; the teacher who wrote this paper previously wrote one of our unit tests; that paper still gave nightmares to my friends for lets say… a long time. This time around though, it wasn’t that bad.
I drank water as usual, and my shit-slow TI-84 Plus CE equipped with a 48MHz 8/16/24 bit eZ80 CPU was my bottleneck. It still carried the rest of the exam though, I applied my usual optimizations (like turning off detect asymptotes off) and things went by far faster.
How??
I attribute this to the clutch factor. Speedrunners and athletes use this term to describe when someone performs better than expected under extreme pressure. I was under pressure; I knew that this whole fiasco would bring my grade down a good chunk, but I had to push through, and I did. Adrenaline saved me, thank you very much adrenaline, I owe you a cookie.
After
After the test, I rushed out of the exam hall. I was still disoriented. As of writing this article (right now it is around 3:57pm), I still have no idea as to what really happened. It really felt like I was in spectator mode. After the exam, I eventually did find my friends and talk to them; they thought that paper 1 was far easier than the warzone that paper 2 was. I personally think that P1 was harder, just because I was in a very disoriented state. Paper 2 was so much better, because I actually had the whole hour to sit it.
Moral of the story, please don’t be late to your exams. But if you are, use your quick thinking. The clutch factor was what carried me, it will carry you too.