That One Time I Failed

_{Photo by Museums Victoria}

The West African Examination Council (Waec) is an examination every Nigerian student has to take and pass in other to get into the university. So passing Waec was very important and that was probably why it was also one of the hardest exams to pass.

The questions were usually from different sections of the courses you studied in High-school, so let's say you did chemistry three years in a row, they would randomly pick questions from those three years, so it was very difficult knowing what exactly to read and focus on, you just have to know a little bit of everything.

So it was a really serious and tough exam. Mine started and everything seemed fine until the day I had physics exam. For a student in science, I've never really liked physics. I mean I could cope with chemistry but there has always been this thing with physics that just has refused to settle down in my brain.

But I had no choice and had to pass it because it turned out physics was one of the major courses I needed to pass, in other to study what I wanted to study in the university. So the day came and they gave us the question paper and I remember for about ten minutes, I froze.

Almost all of the questions looked strange to me, almost like it wasn't written in English. Unfortunately the few ones I knew were the ones I knew had little marks, while the serious questions that had the big marks were strange to me to even attempt to answer. Well I tried my best, unfortunately I couldn't look at my neighbours work because the chairs were all single seats, arranged in a way where you're sitting directly behind the person in front of you, so unless they took their answer sheet to the side to intentionally show you the answers, you would see nothing.

And seeing how we were all from different schools and were sat randomly, the person sitting directly in front of me didn't know me that well to want to take that risk for me because if they're caught, they would automatically fail that particular exam. So like I said, I answered the ones I knew (which I knew wasn't enough) and just sat there hoping for a miracle which never came.

At the end of the whole examination, the results came out and I remember we had to go check it online, so I went with a couple of my friends to go check mine and I remember I had like five main courses I needed to pass in other to go into the university and I looked and saw that I had passed about four of them, I remember feeling so excited until my joy was cut short when I realized I had failed the last one, physics.

I had gotten a D7, which to me meant that if I had just tried a little bit more, I probably would had gotten a C6 which was a pass and was enough for me to get into the university.

Disappointed, I took the result to my dad who wasn't happy either. Failing physics meant two things, it was either I changed the course I had planned to study and went for another one which didn't require me passing physics, or I waited another year to rewrite the Waec exam and hopefully pass physics.

So my dad asked me what I wanted to do and I told him I wanted to study what I wanted to study and he agreed with me, so I waited another year to rewrite the Waec exam. And I remember I felt twice as nervous as I felt the first time when writing that physics exam. My main focus was on that because all I needed to pass was physics and even if I failed the rest, I could make use of my first Waec result and this one, combining both of them to get into the university.

Well, the results came out and as usual I was both scared and nervous. This time I had decided to go with just one of my friend to check the results and when I did, the first thing I looked at was physics and I remembered how scared I got when I realized I had gotten a C6, but then I remembered that having a C6 also meant having a pass and that was when I jumped up in happiness, thanking God for letting me scale through. I had also passed the other four major courses which meant that that result was perfect.

That is one experience I would never want to experience ever again in my life.