While all your friends and acquaintances wish you luck and pretend they hope you will pass your examination.
Why is it that the ten minutes you have to wait before they open those big doors
Seems long enough to contain at least two world wars,
While the three hours in which you are actually doing the exam seem to whiz past like arrows from the bow of Cupid?
(Though I must admit that comparison is rather stupid.)
At last they open the doors, or sometimes only one door,
And into the examination hall the whole crowd attempts to pour.
You eventually push your way in, after a tight fit,
And then you waste about five minutes looking for the place where you are supposed to sit.
After some time you manage to find the right desk
And then you find that you've got one of those chairs of which one leg is longer or shorter than all the rest,
So that as soon as you move a muscle it rocks to the other side as far as it is able.
But you can't complain because the person in front is having the same trouble with his table.
You realize that before you start you have just long enough to skim quickly over the exam -
Section A - Not too bad. Section B - Fair enough choice. Section C ¡K Damn!
Suddenly a foreign voice blares out from loudspeakers all around the room
And you can't hear a word it says, just a continuous rumbling "Boom!"
When it stops talking you begin the paper, scribbling away at a pace quite exciting
Occasionally stopping to wonder what the hell you're writing.
This continues until after some time the voice yells at you again and although
You still can't understand a word it says, because of the echo,
You already know
That it means you have only ten minutes to go.
You write furiously on your last question, leaving out full stops and commas and forgetting completely about writing on the line,
While deciding what would be an interesting sentence to stop in the middle of in the hope that the examiner would think you had something really important to say but just didn't have enough time.
But you are not very optimistic about this because you know
That you finished writing anything at all relevant to the question a couple of pages ago.
Then the time is up and after your paper is collected you go out into the yard
Hoping all your friends will also think it was hard
And most of them say, "Wasn't it a cinch?" which greatly increases your anxiety and doubt,
Especially as you have to wait until next January before the results start to come out.