The compelling nature of Exam results days

Individual stories up against a national collective, sitting in the unknowing, and a very public arena.
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From news channels zoomed in on the faces of students opening their exam results live, broadcasting the very moment success or failure falls out of an envelope, to proud parent Facebook posts and trending tiktoks capturing the shocks, joys or disappointment results day bring, for two Thursdays in August here in the UK we have front row seats to the emotional whirlwind that is results day.

But what is it about results day that makes such compelling viewing? And what is really going on under the surface for the young people and their loved ones? On a day where individual results and stories sit amongst the backdrop of hundreds of thousands of others.

For students receiving their results, it’s likely their biggest, most public judgement of their life to date. The culmination of years of education compressed down to a list of subjects with a solitary number sat beside them. 

To get to this point, young people have navigated their way through a barrage of conflicting messages about these exams and what they mean.

The entire education system and curriculum is geared up to this point. Hours upon hours in the classroom learning the content of the exam syllabus, practising past papers and looking at model answers. They are surrounded by the inescapable message that these are important, exams matter.

But these same students are also carrying with them another, conflicting message and hold an educational history of often being told quite the opposite. Aged 12 they will have likely had a letter from their headteacher telling them their Year 6 SAT’s ‘don’t define you as a person’ ‘don’t show what a kind friend you are’ or ‘don’t measure your sporting or artistic talents.’ Successful entrepreneurs and business people who have a handful of poor GCSE results or no qualifications at all are held up as examples of the little difference exam results can have on adult lives, of the insignificance impact of these exams.  

Young people can find themselves caught between these two opposing messages, unsure of their own sense of how much these actually matter. 

They also carry into results day the individual, personal messages around exams. Maybe coming from families who believe they are important, or those that don’t, those that might give financial incentives to certain grades or those who don’t even have capacity to care if exams were attended.

They bring with them their school and life experience that shaped the last two years and lead up to this day. Young people who may have experienced chronic ill health, family breakdowns, insecure housing, poverty, lack of support, bereavements and those who were inspired by incredible teachers, and learning that was inspired by school trips and projects, who had supportive parents and those who had capacity to make the most of their opportunities.

Whatever their unique story, their results carry so much more meaning than a grade against a subject. 
There is a brutality in the clear cut, faceless scrutiny and judgement of exam answers without a holistic view of the young person being taken into account. And yes, special consideration can and is taken into account for exceptional circumstances, but talk to any schools exams officer and you will very quickly get a sense of how hard these are to get awarded, the stringent thresholds and minimal marginal differences they can make. 

And it is perhaps this sense of the personal and individual pressed up against the backdrop of the collective experience of over 5 million exam results being published on one day that makes this such a completing thing to witness and observe.

For all this is played out in the very public arena of results day. Everyone knows it’s results day, media outlets are thankful for a days worth of content in the quieter summer months, and it can therefore feel impossible to escape the comparisons — between friendship groups, wider peer groups, and the comparison that stretches across the years of siblings. It’s the annual placement of people into a nationwide hierarchy of academic achievement.

It can be a real challenge for adults to to sit in the space of ‘unknowing’ or ‘waiting’, and yet each year we see an entire cohort of young people collectively doing just that. Comparable perhaps to waiting to hear the outcome of a job interview, or medical results, where you know someone else already knows your fate.
For the 16 year olds collecting their results this year, this is exactly where they have been all summer and are at right now. Alongside hundreds of thousands of others, all collectively waiting.

Knowing that all they can possibly do has been done. That the grades have already been decided and sit waiting for them. That the outcome has already been determined, but they don’t yet know them yet.

Receiving their results and grades will bring them a brief split second of relief, that the waiting will be over. But is will be short lived, for the anticipation that has been building for months, from the moment they finished their exams, will immediately, in an instant, be replaced with something else. A rush of pride perhaps, or possibly a very public disappointment. 

Sending all young people and their families all good wishes for results day this year.

Take Care,
Louise