Life in the UK Test

Today, after a week of panicked study, the date of my "Life in the UK" test had finally arrived. I had long been jokingly quizzing people on some of the more bizarre questions that I'd found in the study guides, but it was only a few days ago that I realised, "I can't just quiz people in pubs about this, I actually have to know this stuff!"

I hadn't taken a single non-medical exam since I'd left Oxford, and I felt the rush of a morning before going to Exam Schools when I woke up. Now if only I could wear sub-fusc... I got up early to take a few more practice exams, and while I passed most of them, I still bombed a few which did nothing to settle my nerves. The questions were so random!

1. The percentage of the UK population that lives in Scotland is ____%
2. What percentage of the UK workforce are women?
3. True or False: "One third of all Christians in the UK are Roman Catholic"
4. The Lord Chancellor is responsible for __________.
5. At what age do children in Scotland start secondary school?

I'd picked an exam location within walking distance of my flat, so I walked over there, arriving in plenty of time before the exam. I was called into an office, they checked my ID, and then took me into the computer lab where I was to take my test. As I waited for the minutes to tick off until the exam began at 10 AM, I frantically crammed with my study guide, as did a lot of other people.

Finally, after enough threats and warnings about the number of ways in which we could be kicked out of the exam room for doing something wrong, they checked our IDs again, and we started the exam.

On the exam itself, I felt quite confident about most of the questions, except which two ways you can get a ticket to the debates in the House of Commons (one was definitely write to your MP, but wasn't sure about the second one), and what a "15" rating means on a movie (i.e. Nobody under 15 can see it, or if you're under 15 you have to be accompanied by a parent?) Once again, so random, and I have no idea how this makes me a better citizen.

There were only 24 questions (deceptively easy, but it also means that you can miss only a very few without failing the exam), so although we were allotted 45 minutes to take the test, it only took me about 5. Yet, since the exam is meant to be a test of English as well as knowledge, some of the questions are worded quite confusingly, so I took my time to go back and re-read through everything, making sure I'd gotten it all right. Still, after 10 minutes, I had to acknowledge that I'd gone over everything as thoroughly as I could, and no more amount of reading and reviewing was going to change anything.

So I left the exam room, judging myself to feel reasonably confident, much like when I'd taken exams back in my undergraduate days, unsure as to whether I'd gotten an A, but reasonably confident that I'd at least known the material well enough to pass. Yet, I was still a bit nervous right up until the lady called me into the office. And then she spent forever checking my ID for the millionth time before she finally said, "Oh and by the way, congratulations, you passed!"

She made me sign my pass certificate, and I did too, and then I was free to go. I texted the Tall South African with the good news, and nearly skipped all of the way home, I was so happy to have finally passed!