In my junior years of high school, the thought of an exam absolutely petrified me; I’m not exaggerating. The scariest thought, I believed, was writing an essay to time.
For one of my first exams, one of my exam rooms was somewhere I’d never heard of, so I toddled along to the Student Centre where they gave me...
The examination guide!!!
USYD has thought of everything.
When I’m uneasy about anything or I’m about to do something new, I always find it always helps me to read up as much as possible on the event, so just before I came to uni I practically knew the USYD website back to front. And this exam guide thing definitely eased my nerves.
Your first set of exams can be a bit scary, so try to make sure you know where the room is before the exam. If you have a friend sitting the exam in the same room, it always helps nerves to go there together. There is also a handbook that tells you where all the exam rooms at the uni are.
The guide goes over some pretty obvious things. Make sure you know what you can and can’t take in to each exam. The rules might be slightly different for every subject. I always take a bottle of water in, but only a small one. I don’t like wasting valuable exam time going to the toilet! Don’t forget tissues either because once I had someone SNIFFLING right behind me throughout an entire HSC exam and it was pretty annoying. And you can never be too safe with potential nosebleeds.
I always take several pens, or pencils if the exam is multiple choice. A rubber! A watch (which is basically a permanent fixture on my wrist anyway). My glasses so I can check the “official” time during the exam (plus they make me feel a bit smarter).
Also, regarding seat numbers: this is something that really annoyed me at first and I didn’t give up thinking about it until I figured it out, but your seat number will be different for each exam, and very different for each room you’re in. It’s not based on how many people are doing a subject, it’s actually a count of ALL the exam seats in the uni. It starts in Maclaurin Hall and circles its way through campus, up to the thousands. (Note: you find out your seat number about a month before the exams, through the MyAdmin tab in MyUni).
Your results get sent to you by mail but before that they are posted online through the MyAdmin section of MyUni.
Now all they need to make is a toilet guide to the uni. I remember during the first few weeks my friend always went to the toilets at Fisher no matter where she was on campus because she didn’t know where any of the others were!