A Nightmare called Exams

A friend’s dad once told me,’ never fear anything because the thing you fear the most will come true no matter how hard you try.’ I have to say that he was right. Like every student I have an exam phobia and as it happens the nightmare called exams inevitably comes to haunt me in every six months. I had hoped that once I joined Masters in Public Relations (MAPR) at the University of Mumbai, I might not fear the exams as much as I did in my school and college life till now. Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be.

It was childish of me to think that I might not be scared of exams when I join the Masters in Public Relations (MAPR) because after all it is an academic course and no academic course is complete without exams. It’s said that exams are the only yardstick with the help of which a student’s performance can be gauged.  I should not and I will not argue with that anymore because I consider myself to have outgrown that phase when I questioned the very concept of exams.

The management at the department of communication and journalism which conducts the Masters in Public Relations (MAPR) course also have tried to move away from the cliché that exams are the only way a student’s performance can be measured. This is the reason why they do not solely rely on exams to judge a student but also give equal importance to the way a student performs in the class and in the assignments given. For them exams is just a means to see how well a student has understood the concepts taught to him/her in the class and how well he/she is able to communicate it. For them assignments is a way to judge how well a student can apply the concepts and exams is a way to find out how the concepts are communicated.

It is a good thing because this is the reason why I don’t fear exams as much as I used to before. That said, it does not mean that I no longer think of exams as a nightmare. Exams have and will continue to give me sleepless nights because I guess one of the main objectives of exams is to scare the hell out of the students.