During law school, I took a class on environmental law and national parks that I was really into. I knew it frontwards, backwards, and sideways. When I took the exam, I finished an hour early and looked around at my fellow students who were still busily scribbling away (the era of Bluebooks had not left us yet). I checked my answers a few times and then just figured I had been really prepared for the exam. So, I turned in my exam and sat out in the hallway reading a Thomas Pynchon novel while I waited for my friends to get out.
When they finally left the exam room an hour later, everyone was going through the usual exam post-mortem, which I tried to ignore (I also believe in the credo of Fight Club stated below). Then someone said, "What did you write for question five?"
Question five? What question five? I had answered four questions. There was a fifth?
To this day, I really don't know what happened. Whether I somehow didn't turn over the test paper, or whether there was a printing mistake, I have no idea. I went to my professor, but he said the mistake was on me. I still did fine in the class, although question five was something along the lines of "Explain why you like squirrels," so I probably would've really crushed it if I actually noticed question five. But, except for waking up screaming every six months or so, I've largely forgotten about it.
Which is a roundabout way of saying I absolutely agree with the Fight Club idea of not talking about exams. And I also agree that once you take an exam you should put it behind you and let it go (at this point, if you have a daughter between the ages of five and 11, you probably read the last three words of that sentence in a soaring alto).
Almost everyone of my colleagues, from folks that graduated 40 years ago to folks who graduated five years ago, has a similar story. Clearly, things worked out. The important part is that if you do make a mistake on the exam or realize you answered a question wrong, you need to consciously throw it behind you. Dwelling on it now won't help you. Spending Christmas break beating yourself up over it won't help. And, more than likely, it is less of a disaster than you think (in that environmental law class, I still pulled a B +).
The important thing is to keep moving frontwards.
And let it go!
(If you now need to get Elsa out of your head, I suggest either "What Does the Fox Say" or "Call Me Maybe").
(Alex Ruskell)
