One of the problems I had in the run-up to this exam was that I was capable of most of the Maths, but wasn’t necessarily sure what order to do what process in. Many of the questions carry a lot of weight (some are worth up to 6 marks each). A new qualification, there’s only a few practice papers available, yet the questions vary so much in how they are phrased, it’s difficult really to practice.

I did, though, make a good start: I remembered how to write the equation of a circle, found it relatively easy to factorise where required, and could do the Pythagoras’s Theorem question with ease. I struggled more with the ones on algebraic proof and a particularly nasty one about the area of a triangle within a circle.

Given how badly I’d expected it to go, I can’t complain massively. After all, this is supplementary to the real GCSE Maths grade (in which, after a retake and much work, I attained my dreamed A*). While I know I won’t come out with an enviable grade for this paper, as someone hoping to do Maths at A-Level, this is certain to have given me a great foundation for the Maths to come in the next two years.

Despite successfully answering all the past-paper questions I went through while revising with my father earlier this morning, I struggled to go at the pace I’d been working this morning. That said, I did manage my time quite well, and finished the paper.

There were one or two questions I simply didn’t understand: one required us to produce an audiogram for a person with normal hearing, by placing crosses for frequencies below 20db. I had no idea what to make of that question, and nor did any of my classmates when I asked them after the exam. Similarly, for a question requiring us to draw a ray diagram, I struggled to remember the way diverging lenses bend light.

There were some better parts to the exam: I could answer the high-value one that asked about the centre of mass, and I managed to do the question asking about the motor effect. I knew why iron cores are made of iron, and what a transformer does. But when it came to the final question with a strange graphic depicting a subject I spent hours revising – the life cycle of stars – I just didn’t get it.

Overall, then, not a positive experience of today’s P3 paper, and I’m just pleased that it only makes up 25% of the final grade.

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However, I am disappointed with how I think I actually performed this morning in the Language paper. Unlike my classmate Jack, who last night in an uncensored tweet wrote: “F**k 6, 5, 4, 2, 3, 1. I’m going to do the questions (drum roll) IN ORDER”, I did complete the questions in the non-consecutive order that teachers had suggested. This meant that I gave myself plenty (perhaps too much) time to answer the second section (which I’ve done better on on both past papers), but much too little time to write a response for the first four questions that make up the first section.

We were shown extracts from RNLI’s Lifeboat magazine (about the organisation’s Beach to City programme), an abridged version of a Guardian news article about the widely-reported rescue of the Chilean miners (amazingly that was way back in 2010, just as I was beginning the GCSE English course), and an extract from, I think, the 1974 book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors.

On seeing the sources, I knew that the questions for creative responses would be something about survival or difficult situations, and sure enough, Question 5 required us to write a ‘blog’ about a time we felt unsure or uncertain about something. The problem for me is that I’ve always been quite fortunate, rarely ever finding myself in such situations. I knew the vast majority of the country would write about changing schools, but I really didn’t want to do that because I’d been told to try and make my answer stand out where possible. Instead a wrote about Frederick Agombar, and how I was unsure about whether to jump aboard his ‘magical mystery tour’ of Norfolk while in Norwich a few weeks ago.

My Question 6 (the heaviest weighted question in the exam) answer was less abstract, and when it asked about my opinion of what makes a good role model, I wrote about the drowning of the man who rescued two children in West Wittering last weekend, and about the many unsung heroes who work tireless, without praise, every day.

Sadly, I ran out of time to finish the first four questions to a degree that I’d have wanted to, and this left me quite down after I left the exam hall. I’ll have to wait and see, though, how I’ve actually done.

But the regurgitation of taught ideas on a named poem from the anthology – and then the subsequent comparison of those ideas to ideas presented in one other syllabus poem of the candidate’s choice – makes up only one of the two sections in the English Literature (Poetry Across Time) exam. The other section is an evaluation and analysis of a previously unseen poem, with a theme that could be on anything. Last year’s, for example, was Vicki Feaver’s Slow Reader, a poem which, as its name suggests, is about the difficulty of engaging a child in literature. However, armed with a handy method for approaching the dreaded unseen poem question, I was relatively confident as I entered the sweaty exam hall this afternoon.

I had difficulty deciding which of the two questions – and named poems – to choose, but eventually decided to compare the ways the poets use language to represent relationships in Grace Nichols’s Praise Song for My Mother and Simon Armitage’s The Manhunt. This, I think, may have been a bad decision: the types of love portrayed by both are very different, but The Manhunt is the one I knew I’d be able to write about best, and after about 50 minutes I think I managed to put together a decent response to the question.

I then moved on to the unseen poem, which was Isobel Thrilling’s Children In Wartime. Before entering the exam hall, I’d been worried I wouldn’t understand any of the poem at all, but fortunately, this was not the case, and I spent the remainder of the time looking in detail at the images created and the effect of the words.

Sirens ripped open
the warm silk of sleep;
we ricocheted to the shelter
moated by streets
that ran with darkness.
People said it was a storm,
but flak
had not the right sound
for rain;
thunder left such huge craters
of silence,
we knew this was no giant
playing bowls.
And later,
when I saw the jaw of glass,
where once had hung
my window spun with stars;
it seemed the sky
lay broken on my floor.

Children In Wartime, Isobel Thrilling

Overall, I’m not gutted with what I wrote – I think I gave it a good go. Sadly, even if I’ve done vaguely well in this paper, I fear my English Literature Unit 1 (Modern Texts) mark may pull me down significantly. Anyway, there’s no more I can do now. I’ve one more English exam to go (that’s the long 2hr 15min Language paper on Tuesday), but English Literature at least is now ‘done and dusted’.

Almost exactly a year ago, after sitting the C2 module, I wrote “I managed my time well, left no question undone, and had confidence in the answers I gave”. After seeing how hard I found today’s paper, my reaction couldn’t be more different. I was sporadic in the way I went about tackling the paper, jumping between the overall questions in a bid to ensure I didn’t leave any of the easy ones out, before eventually starting on the harder ones.

It’s not that I hadn’t revised: as for all of my subjects, in recent weeks and months Chemistry has had a large amount of my time (and an equally large amount of my mum’s!) devoted to it. Yet by last night I was still unsure of titration calculations, tests for negative ions, and exact ideas behind the forming of the periodic table. Going over my notes over and over again certainly helped, but my lack of understanding let me down on a number of questions this morning.

“Question 5 – Name one new technology to identify elements.

“er… the ion identify-o-matic 3000.”

totally gunna pass chemistry”

— Pippa Robinson, Facebook post, 24 May 2012

At one point, having looked at my past results, I was seriously considering taking Chemistry at A-Level. I am glad that I decided not to: it’s a subject that seems to me (I appreciate the fact that I am wrong here) to have aspects that are just irrelevant to day-to-day life. Yes, the result of chemical research has saved many millions of lives (and indeed ended many others), but do we really need to know about a sugar refinery worker?

It’s nice to have finished my studies in the subject.

I didn’t find the paper too bad: in last year’s exam, I forgot what ‘Soul’ was on a six-mark question, but thanks to the revision packs and extra lessons given to us by our teachers, I made sure I knew all of the definitions as required.

I probably spent too long on the earlier questions, rather than evenly spreading my time out across the paper, but I managed to put an answer in the answer booklet for everyone, even if my last answer came out slightly illegible due to the speed at which I was writing!

I’m hoping my grade won’t be too bad; I managed to include a number of religious teachings, including Zina, The Ten Commandments, among others, as one needs to in order to reach the higher marks on some of the more ‘valuable’ questions.

Tomorrow, it’s the English (Poetry) and Chemistry exams – my first ‘double exam’ day of the year.

Our class were very unusual in the books we studied; the vast majority of our fellow Year 11s had learned about the 107-page 1937 novella Of Mice And Men and JB Priestly’s 79-page play An Inspector Calls. We, however, had the 224-page Touching The Void (Joe Simpson) and the 296-page To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) books to read. I must confess, though I enjoyed the language of both books (especially the latter) immensely, their sheer length meant I probably didn’t read them enough times.

When the exam finally began, I was pleased to read the choice of questions on Simpson’s book: one asked about the way Simpson builds tension in the opening chapter, and the other asked about the portrayal of the ‘backup man’ for the climbers’ ascent. Feeling more confident on the first of these two questions, I spent a large amount of time jotting ideas down around my question booklet, and then eventually started writing what I hope will be a higher-scoring answer (both questions in the 90 minutes are out of 30 marks). I even had a new interpretation of one passage, and wrote quite boldly on that bit.

The compulsory question on Lee’s book, however, I found more difficult, and though I could analyse elements of the passage provided, I really struggled with finding enough good examples of how Scout does not meet expectations in the book as a whole as it requests.

Still, it could have been a lot worse, and I’m pleased I managed to write at least something.

To my surprise, I was able to answer all of the questions in the booklet. I haven’t necessarily answered them correctly, but after a moment’s thought in some cases, I managed to jot something down on ever dotted line.

Unlike some of the past papers I completed, I wasn’t able to race through the first three questions – they really did make me stop and think, and that seemed to be the general consensus among many of my classmates.

One of the questions was really confusing, and another (at the time) seemed to be weirdly worded: it asked for the “precise name” of a process involving oxygen, which I guessed meant aerobic respiration. Perhaps the question that will stick out in everyone’s minds, though, is the one that asked us about ‘Olaf the Norwegian Farmer’. This man, we were told, did not add fish fat to his biogas, despite evidence that it did increase the amount of methane present. In response to a question asking why, I was tempted to facetiously answer ‘He may not like touching dead sloppy fish’, but I actually wrote words to the effect of the fact that the energy involved in transporting fish the 110 km distance from the sea may not be worth the tiny increase in methane present.

“I hope Olaf the Norwegian farmer is happy now that I’ve failed my biology exam”

— Charley Dyer, tweet following GCSE Biology B3 paper, 21 May 2012

Overall, then, I was relatively pleased with how I’d done as I walked out of the exam hall, especially considering how worried I’d been beforehand, but am lucky enough to know that even if I don’t do well in this paper (as I probably won’t), it’s ‘a mere’ 25 per cent of the final GCSE Biology grade.

The Drama exams are always difficult beasts to revise for: the questions are quite vague while the mark-schemes are the opposite, and there were just two past-papers for this year’s candidates to look at. Furthermore, it seems in order to score top-marks you need to able to write faster than Philip M Parker, and write well.

There is some consistency between papers, though. The first section always asks about a piece you’ve been involved in producing (whether as actor, designer, or technician) and then a choice of sections allow you to write about a piece of professional theatre you’ve seen during the course. However, the sub-questions within each section can differ immensely, and for the latter section we were all advised to know – in-detail – at least four completely different scenes from our chosen play.

This paper wasn’t bad, I don’t think. It wasn’t great, but then I hardly ever say that after an exam. I think I’ll have done better in the first couple of questions (from the compulsory Section A) than in Questions 10 and 11 (from the ‘optional’ Section C), which asked about one actor’s successes. I don’t think I described enough facial expressions in enough depth, or detailed enough about the pitch, pause, tone, and volume of my chosen actor’s portrayal of his character. But I do think I’ll pick up marks from that earlier part of the exam, in which I made sure I answered everything it asked for.

I did take a risk in what I wrote about, going against the advice of my teacher. Most of the theory paper preparatory work we’ve done in class in the last couple of weeks has been focussed on our latest scripted performances, and on the performance of Memoirs of a Biscuit Tin by Maison Foo everyone but I attended in March (I was at a Taplow Youth Choir rehearsal). Instead, I wrote about my group’s devised piece from Year 10, and on Lilly Through the Dark (another Fringe piece), presented by The River People, which I saw in October 2010.

But why? Surely it’d be much, much easier to write about something that’s fresher in my memory? Yes, probably, if it weren’t for the countless exam-style answers I’ve written on those subjects in the last two years.

I’m quietly confident that I’ll get at least an equal grade to my B from last year. But if I don’t, it doesn’t matter – I can ‘cash in’ 2011′s B instead alongside my two performances.

At the end of this first week of the exam season, I’ve had just two exams (the other was the Music Listening paper on Monday). But with the curtain now truly up on this ‘testing’ period, there’s so many more exams to come.

As with several of my other upcoming exams, there are only a limited number of past papers available due to the infancy of this style of exam. In the two practice tests that do exist, I scored a mark that probably looked about average when compared to the rest of the class. By the weekend just gone, I was getting about 75% on most of the tests on the BBC’s Bitesize revision website, but there is only one test for each topic.

I think today’s paper was of equal difficulty to the two we’d done in class. It was certainly not like some exams where I’ve left and thought how ‘unfair’ the paper was, and how ‘nothing we’d covered beforehand’ has come up. Sure, it had a question or two which was not similar to anything we’d seen before, but – on the most part – I had the knowledge to give it a go. I wouldn’t necessarily blame it on the CD player (though I do doubt its bass levels were turned up as loud as they could have been) but I found one question asking about a recording’s bass rhythm very difficult, as I just couldn’t pick out the lowest part from the mix.

I’m not holding out for a high-end grade: I’ll be surprised if I get anything higher than the Cs and Bs I received from the mock exams. That said, I’ll be surprised if I get anything much lower either.

The exam season has begun… but only just. Equating to just 20% of the final mark for its subject, the Music Listening exam is merely an overture for the epic opera – with its fair share of tears, trials, and (hopefully, at the end) one or two triumphs – that is now getting underway.