Exams. Three months of lectures, notes and readings summed up in three hours. Employers will be greatly reassured to discover their future employees' entire educational knowledge takes just three hours to communicate.

This stressful time sends students slightly insane. The hospital has notified the public about an influx of university students admitting themselves with coffee and Red Bull addictions while suffering from delirium, as they rock back and forth rattling off incomprehensible definitions and quotations from their chosen papers. They have labelled this disease as examination preparation overload, aka EPO.
Hopefully, John Keys' new budget has included extra health funds for the treatment of EPO. Unfortunately I have already started to see symptoms of EPO, as my brain becomes so overloaded trying to learn an entire semester within a week.
We had a sunny day in Wellington on Saturday, so friends and I ditched textbooks to take advantage of this rare occurrence. We went to a seal colony, which has recently inhabited the south coast, when the first stages of EPO started to show in one friend.
Ignoring the ‘do not touch' signs he proceeded to try and bond with the seals. He got within an arm's length when a seal turned and roared, its smelly breath causing us all to be light-headed.
My friend ran, and the seal went back to lying in its vegetative state.
The next day I was speaking with another friend who recently went to the zoo (one symptom of EPO is reverting back to childhood.) He was describing how wonderful the giraffes were.
'You know those pointy things on top of their heads? Are they horns?” He asked me.
'Possibly.”
'Oh, I wondered what they were used for.”
'For riding, the Africans leap from trees onto their necks and use the horns as handles.”
'Really? Wow, that's quite amazing.”
Walking away from the conversation, I pondered what benefit exams actually give us. We can scribble facts and figures for three hours straight, but a prospective employer is not going to find that particularly beneficial if you can't come to work because you've been eaten by seals, broken your leg riding a giraffe or undertaken some other unusual physical pursuit.
A paper entitled Reinstating Common Sense needs to be taken before students enter the workforce.
I must go, however, as my flatmate is hanging from the balcony by one arm, attempting to fly like the pigeons. Another good brain lost to education.