The Aftermath Of The Leaving Cert

The Leaving Cert; Ireland's ultimate memory test.

If you're not Irish, the Leaving Cert is the set of exams we take after six years in secondary school and will basically determine or not whether we get into college.
After years of watching the news and Facebook statuses pop up on my screen with people sharing their results and college acceptances, it was finally my time.
I'm a bit disillusioned with the whole Leaving Cert even though I got good grades, or perhaps because I got good grades. The whole thing just consisted of massive amounts of rote learning and more rote learning. I even found myself having to take days off from exhaustion throughout the year because of the immense pressure I put on myself.
The Leaving Cert is abysmal. We struggle to memorize huge amounts of disparate information in 7 different subjects to achieve these elusive points everyone hypes so much. I got B1's in the subjects I'm counting and a one or two may go up to A's in the re-checks and yet I can barely remember a thing from any of them.

It dawned on me after getting my results that myself and thousands of other students were being praised for their ability to retain large amounts of information and then regurgitate it on the day of the exams. Yes, it requires work and I did work hard but the Leaving Cert praises one type of intelligence, one type of learning. And I was lucky enough to find myself having this intelligence or I would be left with a large blank space to fill in. 
One can argue that subjects like French or English cannot be learnt off and that's true. I spent a vast amount of time reading French novels and listening to the news in French and reading freaking Ulysses by James Joyce. But when it comes down to it, all you have to do is know what the examiner wants, and then write.
Even though I had been getting A's and B's in most subjects all year, I didn't know for certain that was going to happen on the day. All I knew was I had to try and remember as much quotes and formulas and keywords as I could.
While I knew there was other ways of entering college, the Leaving Cert was the only pathway I knew I wanted to take. The world of PLC's and Level 6/7's was never allowed to reach my mind. And that's scary. 
The amount of pressure I put on myself and indeed was put on by certain teachers was enormous. Looking back, it's laughable that the teachers that put the most pressure on me never really taught me anything. I found myself basically dropping out nearing the end of school to study myself. I missed over 50 days partly because of stress and partly because I wasn't learning enough in class.
Essentially I felt myself no longer enjoying my favourite subjects because I was just learning them for the "ultimate exam", and not for myself. I figured out that I needed to write not necessarily what I wanted but what I knew the examiners would be looking for. If you hadn't figured that out, oh well. 
Life is inherently unfair, but our educational system shouldn't be designed to reward someone who can memorize a marking scheme.