According to Kids, There Were Questions About 'Vaping and Selfies' on Their Exam Papers

Remember exams? Those young enough for exams to be a memory you can draw upon without saying old people shit like 'O-Levels' and 'domestic sciences' will remember the moment of realising their sheer pointlessness. School is basically an exercise in lying to children and pressuring them into early-onset anxiety. You're told for the first 16 years of your life that you're building up to this big crescendo called GCSEs, and if you fail at them, a life of begging for coins in the rain awaits you, idiot! But then you get your results, either good, middling or shite, and the world a-keeps on turnin'. Turns out your geography teacher may have overstated how important it was that you remembered what a truncated spur is. Turns out that no one on earth gives a shit about your results, apart from other teachers, and maybe Ofsted, if they're feeling particularly cunty.

We didn't really have Twitter back in my day – it existed but the only people who used it were probably Elon Musk and the guys who invented it. Nowadays the ankle-biters are taking to social media to complain about their exams, and more specifically, the contents of them. They've realised that they learned the wrong thing. They were told to learn one thing, learned it, and then it wasn't on the exam. So, much like all schooling past the age of 14, it was a colossal waste of time and effort. It's quite painful to watch.

But in an attempt to modernise the exams and make the weans feel more like the test is their friend, things like selfies and vaping are being referenced. One child reported on Twitter that during their French exam, "vaping, selfies and boys wearing skirts" were the millennial nuggets of choice, among the usual French exam nonsense of asking how you say "where's the plug for my iron?" and "you're not allowed to swim in there, it's poisonous."

Edexel and AQA, the two primary examining bodies in the UK, were chastised by the plucky students for their Dadaist questions, which allegedly included for the maths exam a question on the dimensions of a Mongolian sheep pen. The key stage 3 SATs exam recently came under fire on social media, too, with the English portion of the test being called difficult by people studying the subject at university. The SATs test is intended for 10-year-olds.

Maybe one day we can emancipate our kids from this cycle of memory tests and go back to teaching them trades and stuff, so they can at least be competent lazy bricklayers. I don't mind if you want to sit in your van while it's raining to read the papers, as long as you're properly trained to do it.

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