Exams are very hard and most people don’t like it and would prefer coursework. Exams are the most stressful part of education. You have to spend week after week studying over everything you’ve learnt so far, not missing anything because it might be on the test, absolutely stressed out, only for you to have a stressed-induced blank out on the day and screw it up horribly. Sure, some students can study a bit a day before the exam and come out with an A, but not everyone works like that. This isn’t reflecting a student’s knowledge, it’s gambling their grades on how well their memory holds up under pressure.

In the UK, you need a pass in English and maths GCSE to get a job. But the government have made it so hard to get a pass a lot of people are unable to get jobs and the government say people are wasting their lives just sitting at home or doing crimes and other illegal things. However, the government doesn’t understand that it’s their fault for making us do exams. Exams are extremely stressful and it has been said on the news that many people suffer from mental illnesses because of the stress and pressure from exams.

Callum, aged 16, now in sixth form was doing his GCSE’s last year. He said he really struggled with memorising all the maths formulas, all the English techniques and science. He felt like giving up and didn’t want to do any of his GCSE’s anymore, so he had to go to a place where they work on calming people and work on people that are stressed. This did help him quite a bit but he still was stressed and still felt like giving up because his parents kept saying if he doesn’t get a B-A* grade in all his GCSE’s. They said they will not accept a C grade. Here is what Cullum said to me, “GCSE’s where extremely hard, I felt like giving up, it was as if I was having some kind of mental breakdown, I didn’t know what to do. My whole family was expecting me to get better grades than my older brother. I felt much stressed. The pressure was just too much. I needed help so I went to a place where they gave me help. I worked on calming down when I was stressed and it did help me a lot, but it still didn’t stop my parents from pressuring me.

With coursework, you get time to work on it and you get a few lessons to write it up and you can also use notes when you write up the coursework. Whereas exams are completely different. In exams all you have is your memory. You have to remember everything you have learnt since you started school. Exams are ridiculous. Some people have better memory than others so exams are unfair on people that have bad memory. Some people also have illnesses or disabilities so there should be a way they can be tested the same as everyone else so it is fair and everyone does the same test and everyone’s treated fairly.

Overall, I think exams should be banned and we should be tested another way and not tested on our memory. We could have a separate memory test. There are many more people in the world that are just like Cullum and we need to do something about it or their lives will be ruined without good grades. As I said, it is almost impossible to get a job in the UK without GCSE’s. These exams need to be banned.