Crazy rituals

Michael Blann | Lifesize | Thinkstock

Maybe it’s just a nursing school / nursing student thing? Or maybe it’s just for us crazy people pursing Master’s degrees? Or maybe it’s just the school I’m attending? Who knows.

What I do know is that we love to torture ourselves.

Immediately after an exam, why do all of the students congregate and huddle into packs to dissect and discuss the questions on the exam? Yeah, the exam you literally just took.

Now, let me clarify something. In this particular program we take exams and then we always have a scheduled lecture after class (yeah – torture, I know.). Most of our classes meet once a week, so I’m just assuming that the thinking behind the lecture after an exam is just to monopolize and utilize the time allotted and scheduled. Most of my classes are scheduled and average of 2 – 4 hrs., so the exams last an hour-ish. We have a shortened lecture immediately after the exam.

So, here we are. Completely spent and drained from taking the exam. And somehow we always end up huddling to ruminate over what we just survived. We bounce our ideas and our thoughts on what the correct answer was on just about any and every question we were asked.

I think in a weird sort of way we seem to initiate these conversations to validate our performance. We think we did OK, or we try to create a pseudo-grade in our head. So we talk about the test to see if we in fact are right about our performance on the exam.

I don’t know if it’s just me. But half-way through these conversations I get panic-stricken and start losing a grip. All the answers that I thought were right, were not the answers that the majority of my classmates chose!

Oh-oh.

Maybe I failed the exam? Here I thought the whole time I did OK, heck even thought I did well, and now after the ‘huddle’ I’m paranoid I failed! What the heck! What gives here!

Ever since this ritual was discovered, I keep telling myself after every exam – “Nope. Not gonna do it this time around. I’m not gonna say a peep about the exam”.

And just like clock-work I end up with the paranoia I said I wasn’t going to participate in!

Grr.

Am I all alone here on this one?