Swots: Classic Or Dud?

School is far more important in teaching you the important lessons in life such as how to throw soggy toilet rolls into classrooms, and how to turn a silent classroom into pure noise through tactical humming. It also shows you your place in society. Liam Gallagher hang round with the stupid kids at school, and then formed Oasis.

You know where this is heading, but actually I was hoist on my own lazy botard and did quite badly at Os and v.v.badly at As haha oh.

I was a boff, not a swot. Boffing requires only the ability to piss off your mates by getting good results on no work at all. Ha!

This hurt as much as being told that the only reason I got into MIT was because I was a girl.

Grade point averages vary so much from school to school. At some a B, B- and B+ are all equal to 3. Some allow A+ at 4.3, others don't count classes like Gym into your GPA. I find that that is a very frustrating thing to be used as a comparison when applying to colleges.

That said one would hope to a 50-year-old man a paper from now would look easy as he has had 32 years extra to learn this stuff.

I will happily belittle General Studies though.

Well done Bill. What are you doing on the interweb if you just got AAA though?

But hey, I went to Sainsbury's just now! Woo hoo!

The Exam Boards are also getting better at asking the questions. Maths Question twenty years ago were rubbish, being all complex and not friendly at all. These days maths A-Level ask you to solve a specific problem, rather than doing a scary complicated piece of integration. Nevertheless it is a fact that in science in particular there is less on the syllabus now than there was twenty years ago.

Congrats Bill - I remember being at a similar loose end the day I got my A Level results and found myself wandering down the high street eating Phillias Fogg's devilishly hot tortilla chips because none of my mates wanted to go to the pub (cos they fucked up their A-levels because they went to the pub. Barstards).

I don't understand. At my college, nobody did General Studies because it had the reputation of being impossible to get an A in (same with History). Sheesh.

Exams are getting easier - I did matha A level last year and got a B. Did it again this year and got 157 out of 160. Proof. Bill, is that Ikon in Coventry? Classy.

We have Regents exams in my state, and the chemistry and biology ones are definitely getting easier. The layout for the chem exam I took is going to be redone and a new one offered next year; the new reference table has the ENTIRE organic unit on it, among other things. There go weeks of study and memorization that the next class isn't even going to have to bother with.

I think I must be a swot. Eep. I at least pay reasonable attention in the subjects that interest me, which is every one but math, so they are not difficult. I don't really have a good reason for doing this except that I am preparing to grow up to be either an ass-kisser or a poor starving writer.

Uh, swots are duds cos you get everyone correcting each other in contexts where the corrections don't matter. Or claiming to have thought of something first, i.e "I said as much in reply to your reply on the Melissa Etheridge thread". Even non-swots are suffocated by the greenhouse atmosphere.

Being a swot is a dud cos it means wasting your youth and not finding out about it 'til later when you realize you've lost your ability to care independently and you meet people who really care about what they're learning. Who are also infected by the hothouse atmosphere created by the swots.

So effortless was this school career (it got me my scholarship and Escape To New York ticket) that I really didn't learn about working hard, so I tend to blow off things that take *real* effort and procrastinate due to ability to land on feet, come up trumps, etc. A little hothousing (my mother didn't believe in that Little Man Tate shit for HER genius) might have taught me a bit more self-discipline in the long run.

High school was great for me because after the bullying stopped, most days were Suzy 1, The Inept Masses 0. If they gave grades for eyeball- rolling I'd have got A+. But hardly preparation for the real world where this is not the case.

I shan't hear this talking down of General Studies. It was my only 'A' at 'A'-level, for crying out loud. The 'lessons' in Sixth Form were a treat (one only afforded to me in Upper 6th, due to a timetable clash the previous year) - obviously you couldn't be *taught* anything for this paper, it was just a case of getting out the day's broadsheets and having a natter about current events. Strange how those doing arts/humanities 'A'-levels, who'd been perfectly able to gain adequate 'O'-levels in Maths the previous summer, suddenly fell apart on the CSE-level Maths section (and the slightly trickier Spatial Relations section) of the General Studies paper.

Along the lines of what suzy says, since it wasn't much of an effort for me to get good grades in high school, I am not that good at work that requires planning ahead and not procrastinating.