The Last Exam

‘D on’t worry, nobody ever really fails the exams,” a friend and fellow test-taker reassured me.

“So, you’re saying I have the chance to make Oxford history?” I asked while I fiddled with my necklace.

I was among the hundreds of students gathered outside the Examination Schools on an overcast Tuesday afternoon. We were all wearing “sub fusc,” the formal academic dress required for matriculation, examinations, and graduation ceremonies. Only one small accessory varied: The color of the carnation pinned to our coats. Mine was red to symbolize that I was taking my final exam, although I still have a year left of my degree program and need to submit a dissertation.

I’ve endured many tests, but this one — the linguistics comprehensive exam called “Paper A” — was particularly daunting. Unlike at American universities, exams at Oxford generally occur at the end of the academic year rather than the end of a semester. Accordingly, I had spent the previous ten days trying to memorize everything that had been mentioned in the past nine months, a miserable endeavor complete with emotional breakdowns, heart palpitations, and teardrops falling into my notebooks. The exam gave me three hours to write three long answers, each responding to a prompt from one of the four subfields: Syntax, Semantics, Phonetics, and Phonology. My strategy was to avoid the syntax questions, since I was completely incapable of writing an essay about anything in that area.

Some fellow linguistics students were stunningly relaxed. One declared, “I just need to pass.” Others subjected themselves to an emergency study session and reviewed their notes as we waited for permission to enter the building. I flipped through my mental flashcards on non-pulmonic consonants, a topic that had been asked about in previous years. I reminded myself that the larynx moves upward when producing an ejective, and downward for implosives. Unexpectedly, a guy asked me and another student if “tone” is nasalization. A bit perplexed, we looked at him, then responded that tone is lexically contrastive changes in fundamental frequency. He shrugged. I thought, “If I fail, at least he’s going down with me.”

After we were granted permission to enter the building, I looked at the lists posted on bulletin boards and found my name to discover my assigned seat: eleven, which is neither a lucky nor an ominous number. We stood around awkwardly waiting to be led to our respective rooms. Students talked about their summer plans, or exams that they had taken in previous days. I hardly recognized some of the people I knew; they had an eerie, zombie-like affect, probably a result of taking Adderall or something similar. I stared at the ground and picked away at my half-gone fingernails. “I totally should have dropped out in November,” I thought, then debated whether I should go to the bathroom a second time before entering the testing room.

Eventually, my cohort entered our assigned room, where the strategically distanced desks each had four answer booklets and one question packet. Imposing portraits hung on the walls, along with two clocks. An ornate fireplace was unlit, as it probably had been for decades. The proctor read a speech with guidelines. He said something about not being able to leave the room in the first or last 30 minutes. I wasn’t really listening. Instead, I was worrying that all three of my brand new pens would run out of ink.

Despite my inattention, I clearly heard the proctor’s last remarks: “You may now begin.” If the circumstances had allowed it, I would have popped a bottle of champagne the moment that I flipped over the booklet of questions. By divine intervention, there were two questions that I was well prepared to answer. But I faced a problem: I was unable to write because my hands were shaking from the crippling nervousness. I castigated myself with the fierceness of a Russian ballet coach, “Pull yourself together and start writing.” My first few sentences had the penmanship of a kindergartner, but hopefully conveyed the insights of a scholar.

Time passes differently in the Examination Schools. I had been writing my phonetics essay for what seemed like ten minutes, then looked up at the clock to realize that 30 valuable minutes had disappeared. I wondered, “What cruel phenomenon is this?” I committed a mental act of blasphemy, cursing God that the hour to write my phonetics essay was not nearly as slow as the hour spent in phonetics class.

At one point, I nearly got kicked out. Generally, I write my work by talking. My rule is simple: If I read a sentence aloud and stumble on a word, then that word doesn’t belong. But I couldn’t talk in the Examination School. So I found myself gazing out the window and mouthing sentences while gesturing with my hands — until the examiner, with furrowed brow, shot me an angry glance, effectively warning that I had raised red flags for attempted cheating.

There was a recurring annoying disturbance: the cheering outside. Since not everyone in the Examination School was taking a three-hour test, some students left the building at 30-minute intervals while my cohort had not yet finished, and once they were outdoors, they erupted in joyous celebration.

And then, it was our turn to leave. Everyone sighed after the supervisor told us to drop our pens. My neck hurt from looking down for so long; my right hand and forearm ached from the nonstop scribbling. Regrettably, my handwriting had become increasingly sloppy as the clock ticked and tocked, but I’m somewhat confident my answers were legible. I reflected on my essays. Yes, my phonology answer was just pages of incoherent ranting about the importance of syllables. But it probably deserves a passing grade. Probably. “It wasn’t good, but it was good enough,” I convinced myself as my hand throbbed.

We exited the gates in disorderly fashion as second-year students in the department cheered for us. I was exhausted and elated. I hugged a girl whose name I don’t know. Thankfully, we were exempted from “trashing,” a now-prohibited tradition where students threw streamers, confetti, glitter, and eggs at their friends who walked out of the Examination School. Apparently, “trashing” is now a finable offense due to “environmental” and “sustainability” concerns. (Perhaps Charlie Cooke will favor us with a Corner post detailing his own account of post-examination egging.)

However, we did get trashed — in a different sense of the word. Members of my cohort claimed a large outdoor table at a bar and enjoyed pints of beer. Our hands were stained with ink. The students who had answered the phonology question with a data set compared their answers to see if they had come up with the same phonological rules in the same order. On a napkin, one student replicated the syntax tree that he had submitted. I don’t remember much of what was said because my brain had stopped working at 5:31 p.m., the moment we were instructed to put down our pens.

Now, I write for National Review as a liberated woman, one who is forever free from the burden of exams. Most of my experiences taking tests can be summarized neatly: I worry for days beforehand, and afterward, I wonder what I was so worried about. But my last exam was memorable because of the unique Oxford traditions and formalities — the academic dress, the assigned seats, and the ornate buildings. I felt scholarly to be surrounded by students wearing robes, despite my not being a scholar. Still, any scholar would affirm that learning never ends, and submitting your last answer booklet is just the beginning of an education.