Loveday Writing

F PLUS

My story of failure is something everyone experiences—failing an exam.

The reason why my story of failure stands out to me is because this particular exam was the first and so far only uni exam I have failed. It’s also the only exam I have ever done for uni.

It was two years ago and I was studying WRIT216-Introduction to Editing for Practising Writers. The exam was one of my assessment tasks and it was an exam on basic editing skills and using the right editing symbols. For weeks, I had been reading and making notes from my Style Manual for Editors, Authors and Printers, the set text and I had tried some cramming.

The day of the exam, I was shooting (photo shooting, I’m not an assassin) Daniel Jackson, a Wollongong Hawks player during a training session. I was doing this for another subject, Photojournalism. Knowing I had the exam on, I caught a taxi and ran with hundreds of dollars of university photographic equipment on my shoulders to the classroom where the subject and therefore the exam was held. I got there on time by the skin of my teeth, however somehow, my lecturer miscalculated the size of the class and didn’t have enough copies of the exam, so I didn’t up taking it when I was supposed to, from memory I ended up taking it during the tutorial the next day.

I, along with the handful of other people who couldn’t take the exam the previous day for the same reason, took the exam in another room. I’ve never been good with exams, I study and work hard to be prepared, but when I sit down and take the exam, I get nervous and the knowledge flies out the window so I had a bad feeling I would fail. Sure enough when I read the exam during the reading time, I knew I was going to fail but I still tried my best like I always do.

I got my mark back a week later, I got 42 out of 100—I failed by eight marks. To remind me of my failure, my lecturer put an “F” next to the mark, but at least it was marked in green and not red. A week later, I got a letter from the university to tell me I was at risk of failing the subject because of it, I knew how the system works and knew it wasn’t true, it was just to add insult to injury.

Whenever I talk about it, I like to be optimistic and call it an “F+”, a high fail because it wasn’t that bad and I did end up passing that subject with flying colours thanks to two distinctions with my other assessments. When I was in high school, it was brainwashed into me that failing exams equals failure for life, but I discovered with that subject that failing one exam isn’t the end of the world.