A brief and contrived guide to things not to do before your A-levels

The first thing you mustn’t do, before sitting your A-levels, is to convince yourself that the A-levels are the ultimate test of life. They aren’t. And precisely because they aren’t, you can tackle them more effectively. The school-leaving exam is an important test, of course; it is a rite of passage, a gateway, a stage, a small public test of resilience, but it is not the supreme court of existence. Anyone who burdens it with disproportionate expectations risks arriving there already defeated, not through a lack of preparation but through an excess of drama. The student’s greatest enemy is not the examination board: it is the idea that everything depends on those few days.

The second thing you must not do is study as if you had to catch up in forty-eight hours on what you have not done in five years. That last-ditch, desperate rush to get through the syllabus – with textbooks open until three in the morning, summaries devoured without a breath, diagrams mechanically copied out – often produces the opposite result to what was hoped for: more confusion, more exhaustion, more panic. In the final days, you should not be attempting to build new knowledge from scratch; you need to organise what you already know. Revising does not mean cramming pages; it means recognising connections, clarifying priorities, and knowing where to start if a question comes up.

The third thing to avoid is studying only what you like. It’s an understandable temptation: your favourite novel, your beloved philosopher, the war you remember best, the author who seems tailor-made to be written about well. But the Maturità isn’t a cultural karaoke session. You need to have two or three strong points, of course, but also a minimal safety net covering the topics you like least. There’s no need to become a specialist in everything. You need to avoid having gaps so large that they turn a normal question into a Greek tragedy.

The fourth thing to avoid is creating bogus links – those ready-made, high-school-level connections where everything hangs together precisely because nothing has really been thought through. The twentieth century linked to anxiety, anxiety linked to Freud, Freud linked to dreams, dreams linked to Pascoli, Pascoli linked to nature, nature linked to the climate, the climate linked to science: and in the end, there is no coherent argument left, just a chain of words. Links work if there is an idea behind them. You mustn’t link everything to everything else. You need to link few things, but link them well.

The fifth thing to avoid is relying on digital superstition. Searching TikTok for “likely A-level exam questions”, asking ten chatbots for ten different predictions, reading forums full of terrified students, or watching yet another video promising “the five sure-fire topics” often just adds to the noise. Artificial intelligence can help you practise answering questions, summarise material, and check whether a concept is clear. But it cannot become your ‘exam fortune-teller’. It does not know what the examination board will ask. And anyone who studies only what they consider likely is exposing themselves to the oldest of academic pitfalls: the unexpected. The sixth thing to avoid is confusing memorisation with recitation. Learning perfect sentences by heart can give you confidence, but if a question then comes at you from an unexpected angle, that confidence crumbles immediately. It is better to be able to explain a concept in your own words – even if they are less elegant – than to repeat three magnificent lines without really understanding them. The examiners will forgive a less brilliant turn of phrase. They are less forgiving of the impression that the student is reading from a flimsy script in their head.

The seventh thing not to do is to get too little sleep in an attempt to appear more serious. Insomnia is not a sign of maturity. It’s a toll on your mental clarity. Turn up for your exam tired, nervous, pumped full of coffee and with notes underlined right up to the last second – that’s not heroism, it’s self-harm. To function properly, the brain also needs sleep, breaks, fresh air, a normal diet and silence. It may seem like obvious advice, but in the week leading up to your A-levels, the obvious becomes revolutionary: getting enough sleep means studying better.

The eighth thing not to do is to turn your classmates into instruments of torture. Discussing things can be useful, but listening to everyone, comparing yourself with everyone, asking everyone ‘how far have you got?’, ‘how many authors have you covered?’, ‘how many practice exams have you prepared?’, is an excellent way to lose confidence. There will always be someone who seems to be further ahead. There will always be someone who claims to know everything. Often this isn’t true, but even if it were, it wouldn’t change a thing. The school-leaving exam isn’t a competition to see who’s most anxious. The ninth thing not to do is to act as if you have to prove you’re an adult by pretending not to be afraid. A little fear is normal. The mistake is to be ashamed of it. The school-leaving exam is so called partly because it forces you to come to terms with a simple fact: growing up doesn’t mean never trembling; it means trembling and still managing to speak. The examination board isn’t looking for perfect machines. It’s looking for young people capable of reasoning, finding their bearings, correcting themselves, and not crumbling in the face of an unexpected question.

The last thing you should do is forget that an oral exam is also a conversation. You mustn’t answer in monosyllables, but neither should you overwhelm the examiners with endless speeches. You mustn’t bluff too much, because academic bluffing doesn’t last long. You should not say "I don't know" as if it were a sign of defeat, but you should not make things up either. It is much better to say: "I don't recall that detail, but I can reason from the context". The A-levels also reward the ability to stay within limits.

Preparing for exams, therefore, also means learning not to harm yourself. Don’t pull all-nighters. Don’t chase every prediction. Don’t make far-fetched connections. Don’t just study what you like. Don’t turn anxiety into a study method. Don’t believe that everything hinges on those few days. The school-leaving exam is important, but it’s not a life-or-death matter. It’s a test. And tests are often best overcome when you stop fighting them as if they were monsters and start approaching them for what they are: a step along the way, not a destiny.