I am constantly reminded that my fear will only diminish once I stare it in the eyes. At the end of 10th grade, I remember telling my friends “F*deu. Next year we will be having junior exams.” Low and behold, those dreadful 10 days came. I had no clue what I was stepping into, but reading this, hopefully you can get a sense.

Let me begin by saying everyone’s experience in this testing is completely different. Some had most of their tests in the first week, others had all 5 cramped into the last 3 days. The way studying is spread out varies tremendously depending on your subjects, and honestly, your luck. There’s no universal junior exam survival guide, because all schedules and study methods are different. One person is carefree because they have been getting 5’s in math the entire year. Another is still walking into an exam on the very last afternoon, running on caffeine and whatever fragments of knowledge survived the week. And in the corner, is a student calculating what grade they need on the test to maintain their current class grade.

But no matter how many weeks in advance you start preparing, you will never feel ready. You think you’ll be extremely organized but by the time you’ve finished your TOK exhibition, you are far too drained to remind yourself what a PPC curve even is. Junior year has a way of humbling you. You enter thinking you’ve figured out how to be a student, and then the workload politely reminds you that you have not.

This year, it became a collective consensus that the science tests were brutal. Although physics is a case entirely apart, these exams pulled at a niche, overlooked details that many of us (especially me) had skipped over while cramming thinking “this probably won’t come up”. It turns out the examiners have a very specific talent for finding exactly what you decided wasn’t worth memorizing and making 60% of the test be just that.

There’s also the social dimension nobody really talks about. The junior exam period has its own atmosphere. Our new lawn fills up with people you’ve never seen study before. Group chats that were the occasional memes become frantic question exchanges at 2am. Someone always claims they haven’t studied at all, and you can never tell if they’re being honest or just trying to make you feel better. Either way, it doesn’t help.

The truth is, many of us juniors barely studied. And considering everything, the sleepless nights, the TOK deadlines, the general chaos of junior year, the tests were not as bad as expected. The second they were over, the weight of them felt so much smaller than it had in the days before. Funny how fear works like that. You dread the monster under the bed, and then you look, and it’s just a pile of old EoL’s you should have reviewed sooner. Future juniors, take this as you will: a warning or some reassurance.