Letter to the Editor: Exam anxiety continues in the time of Covid

Exam anxiety dreams are common, argues a letter writer.

It seems exam anxiety dreams are common, even decades after we have left exams far behind us. 

I myself still have them where I am taking exams, completely unprepared, though I was always careful to create a plan for study where I revised everything twice, following my own theory, so in reality I never suffered any anxiety leading up to any real exams.

I expect that soon I will be having different exam anxiety dreams, where unexpectedly, the exams are cancelled, and grades will be assigned according to results of mock exams, decided by teachers who are aware who they marking. 

My own mock results were much worse than my actual LC results. All the media discussion of estimated results in these Covid times focuses on teachers who might over-mark their pupils. There is no focus on those pupils who might be deliberately under marked by their teachers, as if this had never ever happened before.

In the 1970's I knew of teachers who blatantly under-marked (or refused to mark at all) those pupils judged wanting in religious zeal. 

The effected pupils were only disadvantadged in that they were flying blind into the Leaving Certicate, not knowing where to concentate their efforts, but they were sure that the actual LC results would be unbiased. That won't matter now, you might say, extreme Catholics don't have the same sway as they did in the 1970s. 

Maybe that is generally true, but who is to say that a pupil will not be disadvantaged for not being sufficiently attuned to some other religion, or not being suffiiciently attuned to some new world view with the characteristics of a religion? 

Could not a pupil be marked down for not being sufficiently 'woke' or even for being too 'woke', depending on the ethos of the school or the views of an individual teacher?

Tim O'Halloran

Finglas 

Dublin 11