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A-levels Recovery

Any advice on how to not worry about exams, after having finished? I genuinely cannot think about anything but how awfully i’ve done.
Literally any tips
(or maybe just therapy)

Reply 1

rwnsl

i’ve just finished mine as well so obviously i haven’t been through specifically this situation with a levels before, but i did go through it with gcses and i do have major exam stress especially during the aftermath!

i think the best thing to do is to really take some time and look after yourself, it’s a stressful month for all of us taking exams and taking some time to focus on self care allows you to reset and get your head out of exam stress mode. it’s also important to remember that our brains often automatically go to the worst case scenario with things like exams, and the anticipation of results day makes it worse! in reality, you’re likely just picking up on every little thing and you’ve probably done better than you think!

our brains like to focus on the few minor things we may have messed up, but at the end of the day you have to accept that no one is perfect and the examiners don’t expect you to get everything 100% perfect! exam mark schemes often include “any other relevant material/justified conclusion” as something to credit and say that not all of their indicative content/workings are going to be in every answer. examiners mark positively — you gain marks for what you’ve done, you don’t lose marks for what you haven’t done :smile:

exams are over and you can’t change how you’ve answered the papers, looking at it with hindsight it’s easy to think “oh i should have written this” “oh i did that wrong”, but everyone in the country will be in the same position! all you can do now is enjoy your summer, worrying won’t change your grade and you don’t want to look back on this summer as one where you spent the whole 2 months stressed and not enjoying yourself. if things don’t go as you wanted them to on results day, there will always be other options to get you where you want to be. a levels aren’t the be all and end all of the world, and you can even resit if you need to