There’s nothing worse than Saturday exams

Where’s the freedom?


There really isn’t anything quite like Saturdays. A day that is culturally engineered to do nothing. It’s a day to go for coffee with friends, or not get dressed until 4 o’clock or maybe even some causal daytime drinking. It gives you the freedom to get unbelievably hammered on Friday night and helps you recover for the week ahead. However some universities want to compromise that freedom by having exams (arguably the worst form of torture) on this precious day. Which in turn, makes exam season even more mentally and emotionally taxing.

The points I’m about to make, I feel, really emphasise the dark and twisted nature of their existence.

They’re totally unnecessary

Not all universities have exams on Saturdays. The ones that don’t, seem to manage. I can imagine the main arguments that can justify having exams on Saturdays. 1. If there are loads of exams to get through, they all need to get done by a certain time. 2. There are only so much standing around an invigilator can do in one day. 3. There are only so many rooms you can do exams in at one time.

Now I can’t speak for every uni in the country but I’m pretty certain that if you go into any given building between the hours of 9am and 6pm I’m sure you’ll find that most of the available rooms are empty. Why can we just split people up into those empty rooms? We could be managing our space and time so much better and then we can be blessed with our beloved start to the weekend! And if there’s an issue of staffing, I’m pretty sure you don’t need to be a genius to know when someone is cheating and when someone isn’t. Just get more people in. No matter how easier it would seem, there’s always more that can be done for the sake of a day off.

If you’ve got a job, you’re going to have to take the day off

For some students, working part time is vital. The only source of income they have is through work and to compromise that can make life very difficult. The audacity that someone has to sacrifice their week’s wage for an exam! People talk about the gap at uni not being as large as everyone makes out, but this is genuinely making life difficult for the less affluent students.

If you’re in catered halls, you’re not eating till dinner

Waking up on any other Saturday would fill any fresher with glee. The thought of a full English to start the day off is enough to get anyone excited. Any other Saturday you wouldn’t mind the fact that brunch started at 11am but if you’ve got a three hour exam starting at 9am looks like any thought of food has gone out the window. The worst part of this situation is that you won’t even be able to eat a proper meal before your exam, so all the way through you’ll be trying your best to play off the noises coming from your stomach. Meanwhile everyone from the self-catered hall off-campus is laughing.

You’re missing out on one more precious day of revision

You might think that spreading exams out across a six day week instead of a five day week might give you more time. But the fact of the matter is that if you’ve got an exam on Friday and an exam on Monday, you’d sure as hell want an extra day in-between.  As is the case with any piece of assessment at uni, time is very much of the essence, that final stretch just before an exam is where the magic happens. The more time the better.

Sadly, no matter what I say, no matter how convincing all of this is, the world we live in is one of torture. As all of your friends who went to other uni’s spend their Saturday mornings leisurely wasting sweet sweet time, you’ll be either in a sweaty exam room with a load of your tired, frantic course-mates, wishing you took that elective with 100 per cent coursework.