The Day of the Test

My overriding emotion as I pottered round to the school for my Social Studies test was one of extremely irrational grumpiness. And if there’s one thing I’m good at it’s being grumpy in an irrational way. I had said I could do a funeral in Herøy afterwards and had come to regret it as I was worried I might be cutting it a bit fine. I generally like to be at the church at least an hour before the service so that I can rehearse but also to double check that I’ve got the correct church, or, for that matter, the correct island. I wasn’t too stressed about the test itself - I like to think that I’m quite good at crash revising for things - my problem (or at least one of them) is that I don’t retain the knowledge for very long afterwards.

If memory serves, the course was meant to be 75 hours so I did a ton of revising in the couple of weeks I had to prepare. Come the day of the exam, I could tell you about climate conditions in the Stone Age, dietary habits of Norwegians in the Bronze Age, the rise of Christianity, the constitution, taxation, NyNorsk and Bokmål (2 written Norsk languages), equality, unions etc. but come the exam the only question I had to think about for more than a moment was selecting what phone number to use if I found someone dying on the road side after a cycle crash.

My grasp of Norwegian can be a bit ropey at times and despite the fact that I know fine well that “75 timer” means 75 hours, I had it in my head that it meant there were 75 questions. I blitzed my way through to number 38 and was surprised when there were no more questions. The invigilator was equally stunned when I was finished - forgive the immodesty but I believe I was a/ the quickest person ever to complete the test and b/ scored 100%.

It was strange coming out with a feeling that I wished it had been harder - I hadn’t really felt that challenged by it. I did enjoy doing all the revision though!

I then had to go back to Mosjøen to hand in my forms again. Once again I found myself all in a fluster and despite being pretty sure that at least one set of forms that I handed over were the same wrong forms I had handed over the first time, I was relieved to eventually get my residency card through the post.