I always hated exams at school – now I realise they’re a byproduct of colonialist thinking

I found myself tasting cake in a tent earlier this week. It was a demob happy tent, one filled with teenagers working in teams of four to be crowned Great Ibstock Bake-off champions. Such is the random joy of my life and not something any career advisor might have seen coming.

The delightful kids at the impressive Ibstock Place School, a heinous den of elitism in the London suburb of Roehampton, soon to be gunned down in the Labour VAT raid, were in post-exam cool-down mode. You might recall that glorious feeling of being at school without the stress of being at school – your fellow pupils now simply your friends, the canteen turned into a free restaurant, no lessons, just organised fun.

And for this brief moment, your mind is simply on the fact that exams have finished. Results? They’re another chapter in the future.

I was hauled into this place by an old pal who has made the honourable switch from journalism to education, his experience of newspapers making him a fabulous teacher of English. I tasted endless cakes, witnessed some ingenious “saves” – the icing over a baking mishap – and relished the unexpected joy of the victors who had recreated, in edible form, the school’s famous orchard; chocolate roots and bark and marshmallows for apples.

What an utterly charming bunch they were and how I relished their spirit of post-exam bliss. I wasn’t great at exams. I failed my Common Entrance at 13 (lined up in the headmaster’s office at my prep school to be told “Sitwell, you failed”). And, although I made the grade, just, on the second attempt, experienced the familiar ghastliness of failure a year or so into Eton, this time in a theatre packed with the entirety of my year group and a master who called out the immortal line: “The following are General Total Failures”, and, yup, I was one of that year’s glorious three.

OK, so he actually said “Generals”, as in I’d failed the exams known as “Generals”, but that was me labelled: GTF Sitwell. I’ve now almost recovered. Almost. At least they were over. Until the next year. And how I relished those last days at school, the summer sun and freedom beckoning, Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach blaring from the radio.

There was one more set of the dastardly things at university (Kent at Canterbury) and I recall finally walking out of the exam hall and feeling the information I’d spent weeks mugging up on falling out of my ears, as my brain relaxed, like the retreating tide.

Remember those wretched teachers, marching slowly through the hall between the desks, manifesting that horrible word of “invigilating”? Checking none of us was somehow cheating, no graffiti on the inside forearm. Then horror, dismay, at turning the sheet over and seeing the first question. Or was it relief? Yeah, baby, that nugget we planned for had come up.

Then off we went, words pouring onto the page, sometimes for up to three hours. My right hand still aches.

What a grim invention the exam is. I don’t remember that fabulous get-out clause – “coursework” – being around when I was at school or uni. It was exams, all or nothing. And the concept continues to haunt my dreams; a recurring nightmare of an impending test that I’ve done no revision for. Which is not quite as bad as the other one: I’m about to go on stage but have no idea of my lines, nor what the actual play is.

Now I read that it doesn’t have to be this way. Exams are a construct, an expression indeed of colonialism. In Trends in Higher Education, a journal, Dr Zahid Pranjol, deputy head of the school of life sciences at Sussex University, writes that timed exams are a “manifestation of colonisation in present-day higher education”. Universities, he argues, are trying to mould diverse students into a singular standard set by the Eurocentric curriculum. To do well in exams, students are forced to adhere to a practice rooted in the British Empire’s belief in its “cultural and intellectual superiority”.

In other words: exams are racist. I knew it, I knew it! And those masters wandering up and down with their tweed jackets and grey trousers are the officials and viceroys lauding it over us, the suppressed peoples of the Empire.

OK, so Dr Pranjol sounds like a loon, but we exam failures need all the help we can get. Especially as it won’t be long before the dreaded results day when those students who have bagged the As and A-stars are pictured on the front of newspapers jumping for joy, while the rest of us feel even lonelier and more isolated. They have their grades, their futures are set; we have the prospect of a dud CV or, worse: re-sits.

Exam failures of the world unite! They are not the be-all and end-all. And you’ll have a passion, something you’re interested in and can become good at. It may be a circuitous route and it might take a while for you to get there, but you will find your metier. And, you can be damn sure that, when you do arrive at your destination, there won’t be any exams involved.