Of course exam results matter – but let’s redefine what ‘success’ actually means

If you can face disappointment of the deepest kind and then come back with a new plan you will be just fine, writes Katy Brand

Students across the country received their A-level and GCSE results this week (EPA)

It has become a national event, something we can set our watches by, something perhaps we have even come to rely on. And this year we were not let down, for as students around the country opened their exam results with shaking hands, so Jeremy Clarkson released his much-anticipated annual tweet, telling us all that good results don’t matter as long as you grow up to be just like him. He got two Us at A-level and still managed the astonishing feat of becoming Jeremy Clarkson, and so therefore the whole damn system isn’t worth a single salty tear.

In fact, social media was ablaze with celebrities of various calibres telling young people who are not on Twitter and wouldn’t follow them even if they were, not to worry because even if you failed everything and didn’t go to university, you too could, by a series of extraordinary coincidences, a dollop of good luck, or the abuse of existing family connections, achieve the same level of career success they had. I include myself in this bracket. Offering unsolicited advice to imaginary teenagers is a temptation I have fallen victim to. It’s certainly a lot easier than offering unsolicited advice to real teenagers – I know, because I’ve tried.

And yet, though some of this tweet activity is obnoxious, and much of it is redundant (why would they listen to a parent solemnly reading out an advisory tweet from some woman they’ve never heard of, AKA me, when they don’t even listen to the parent in front of them?), I still think there is some value in the elders of the tribe weighing in to say that there is more to life than exam results, on or off the socials.

But as many of us who sent out our rather gauche tweets also know, exams are not the be all and end all. They help, of course, but ‘success’ is a many textured thing – how do we define it?

This is not to say that results don’t matter at all – mine were rather key to be perfectly honest and I will not say otherwise for cheap “likes”. But rather, they are not the only thing that matters, especially when you have your whole life ahead of you and an expanding horizon thanks to new technology and changing attitudes to what work really is, where you can do it, and how you choose to deliver it.

Yes, exam results matter because at some point in our lives we need to measure ourselves against one another in order to find out who is basically good at what in an objective sense. I would prefer medical schools to have tests. But outside of life or death careers, what is objective? This year when teachers were left to mark their own students’ exam papers, private schools had a bumper crop whereas the state sector was left behind. We can speculate as to why this is, but perhaps some part of it is the private sector’s general air of entitlement that gives people the cover to inflate a little, rather than play it safe, and possibly more honourably.

But as many of us who sent out our rather gauche tweets also know, exams are not the be all and end all. They help, of course, but “success” is a many textured thing – how do we define it? I went to Oxford University from a state comprehensive, and it changed my life for the better. But I also saw dozens and dozens of fellow students, many of whom were privately educated and had six top A-level grades to my three, fall apart before my very eyes. Some dropped out entirely. Others completed the course and then disappeared, went off grid, rejected everything about their privileged lives to that point. Some went into very high paying jobs and burnt out within three years, or developed major drug addictions, or became enmeshed in a world of dubious morals that first captivated them, and then alienated them from all their old friends.

Is that success? It doesn’t feel like it to me, though on paper these people were supposedly living the dream. I like to study people I admire, those who have made a life that seemed to fit them best, to bring out some inner glow, and there are two things I have found they all have in common – resilience and adaptability. The world is changing fast, for good and bad. Exam results help, so I do not turn my nose up at them. But if you can face disappointment of the deepest kind, and then come back with a new plan, you will be just fine. Perhaps that applies to all of us.