Those were the days my friend...

RIGHT about now there’s a whole heap of year 12 students across Australia that are in an advanced state of stress because of their last-ever exams for school.
At the end of these exams the students head into the Real World, where instead of pulling on a uniform and going to school for six or seven hours a day they may now have the privilege of pulling on a uniform and working for up to 12 hours a day.
This won’t happen for everybody though - a large number of students will take the opportunity to further their education at TAFE (Technical and Further Education if my memory serves me correctly) colleges or universities. This path has the wonderful bonus of being in a group where excessive drinking is not explicitly encouraged, but certainly isn’t going to get you banned from good parties (unless you go completely overboard, which is not a good thing).
But the whole way the exams are done in New South Wales has many students a wee bit concerned.
Year 12 students down here sit for their Higher School Certificate (HSC), with these final exams apparently make up 50% of the total mark over two years for that subject.
I say apparently, because I did my own schooling in Queensland, where things are broken up a little more.
As can be expected some are rather concerned about this, especially those who want to get into a high-powered career like medicine or law. Then there are those who add atmosphere to the local pub’s trivia night every Wednesday by making an awful lot of noise and making it hard to hear the questions.
But surely there has to be a better way than saying that one exam is half your mark. What happens for the other three semesters - do you just bludge them and just do really well on the finals? Who knows.
There’s also concern in the scientific community that there’s not enough young scientists coming through. Figures in a Sydney Morning Herald article show that 17% of year 12 students studied chemistry in 2002 and 16% physics. This compares with 33 and 29 per cent respectively in 1980.
I can only give my view on this as one of those who started off on a science course and didn’t quite get through.
It would seem to me that to be a successful scientist you have to really enjoy what you’re doing and want to do it. My own enthusiasm waned once you got past the "add this to this and make a pretty colour" and into entropies, electron valances and the bonding of carbon with non-metals in an alkaline solution.
Instead of studying all these worthwhile things, I was instead espousing my views on cricket newsgroups about whether Matthew Hayden should be in the Test side (his average was in the 20’s at that stage), drawing random things on my lab coat (never give me a permanent marker) and going out every other weekend (all good, clean, wholesome fun).
It wasn’t until I failed pretty much every subject that I decided journalism might be more rewarding personally - thanks to a suggestion or two.
But how do we get more people following the path I stepped off? Perhaps we should place more importance on what these people do, celebrating a major scientific discovery much the same way we celebrated Michael Clarke’s century on debut. This would encourage more kids to at least have a go at the sciences, increasing the talent pool from which we get our "elite athletes" of that field.
Sport’s all well and good, but it wouldn’t hurt to hail the achievements of our more mentally flexible people.