Practical Papers Are Practically Unpractical

Ok, exam season is coming (well, it’s here already to most of us) and it’s time to let the nerves get to work. As nervous am I for all the Pre-AS exam papers, objective and subjective papers are nothing compared to practical papers.

For practical papers, we will spend 2 hours in the lab to either conduct the experiment asked in the question paper or just trying to figure out what the questions ask us to do. I’m trying to avoid the latter.Even so, two experiments in 2 hours sounds rather stressful. The CIE is really trying tense us up. Do they think Einstein, Edison and Newton finished their experiments in a few hours?

I really don’t like practical. I know in my future line of work, I must always be practical. There’s no theoretical work, unless I wanna be a reasearch physician. I’m going to disect somethings hither and thither, concoct some god-knows-what preparations, toucing the human body incessantly (for examination…don’t be so dirty-minded) etc etc. But practical is so..uncertain, I mean you can’t really know the answer. One wrong reasult, and you can kiss the A goodbye.

So suppose these practical exams gonna prepare me for my degree studies? Lets see…

Biology practical is probably the hardest one to me. I’m impartial towards it. One of the question qould always be about examining specimens under the microscope. Easy enough right? Wrong. Sometimes, the microscope can be faulty, and the only thing you can see is light. Bright, useless light. But you can always inform the supervisors. The pother experiment could be about food test, enzyme etc, which can take a lot of your time.

Physics practical is probably the easiest, but the most boring. Here are the experiments we’ve done so far: dropping ping pong ball, dropping cone-shaped paper, spinning ruler, rolling a plasticine down an inclined plane, and did I mention dropping ping pong ball? Who knows what we might have to drop next. Still, physics takes the shortest time which is fortunate because I couldn’t bear to drop balls for 2 hours.

Chemistry practical is so so, but my favourite. Sure I hate titration, but it’s not hard and as long as there’s any colour change, you know you did the experiment correctly. The calculation parts are annoying though. The other is qualitative analysis, and I love it. Basically you just mix around various chemicals, test for gas, heating and sorts, and you just deduct what ions are present. But there’s a risk of getting the ions wrong, and the mixture exploding. Not unlike the cartoon ones, but yeah, the mixture can shoot out of the boiling tube like *****. Unless you’re careful, you might end up looking like Two-Face.

Yes, practical is not the same as theory papers. It require’s skills, luck and, well, practicality. Now you know why I’m scared of practical exams. On a bright side though, there’s not much to study for practical….

P/S: Next week is Pre-AS exams, last until 16th April. But between, 4th to 13th, I don’t have any papers. Still deciding whether to go home. Opinions please.