It's that time of the year again...

That time that fills students everywhere full of dread - exam period.

Whether you're doing your GCSEs in maths and English or a degree in a subject that no one's ever heard of, the exam period is stressful for everyone. Or is it? Perhaps you're one of those astoundingly lucky people who manages to pass exams without even opening that textbook that you bought at the beginning of the year.

Fortunately for me, I seem to be solidly getting As and Bs in everything at the moment... the most stressful it's been for me up until this point was dealing with studying an entire A level in 9 months.

However, the exam hall is always quite intimidating, I find. Invigilators breathing their coffee-tainted halitosis all over the place whilst giving you the hawk eye is somewhat disconcerting. Furiously scrawling every idea I can pluck from the mush between my ears, I always find myself wondering, "is this even right at all?" - and half of the time, it probably isn't. We look around the room aimlessly, trying to figure out how much people have written - is it more than us? - we play around with our pens, we highlight random pieces of text on the exam booklet, and eventually write something which we hope will be good enough for a decent future.

Throughout school I never cared about my exams. I did no revision for my GCSEs and winged the lot of them, mainly with average grades (with the odd A* and A thrown in there). But college has turned me into a manic bundle of stress with little faith in myself.

Who knows what will happen when I walk into the exam hall this summer. Good luck to everyone else taking exams!