By Lucy Kellawa
Last week, I promised my daughters that whatever they do in their working lives, nothing will ever be as bad as this. It was 10.45pm and they were sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by notes on exothermic reactions and quotes from Paradise Lost. When all this is over, I assured them, what comes next will seem a doddle. GCSEs, A-levels and finals are a hell that nothing in the office will ever match.
They looked at me contemptuously and I can see why. It seems so unlikely that life's most traumatic tests should come so early; that paid work, which is serious, should leave us so relatively untouched, whereas academic work, which should be more carefree, can scar for life.
Yet more than 25 years have passed since I sat finals and still I wake at night with my heart thudding, dreaming that I had forgotten to revise, or had had to take physics instead of philosophy. In my other standard nightmare, all my teeth have fallen out, but that dream is a walk in the park compared with that moment of existential despair when you are in the school gym and you turn over the paper to find yourself unable to answer the questions.
There is no job interview, no scary presentation, no terrifying after dinner speech, no bruising negative feedback that can do such lasting psychic damage. Nor is there any work project (unless one is a corporate lawyer or investment banker) that requires such mercilessly hard work.
I mentioned this to a friend who has a senior job in business. She said the raw effort she put into revising The Faerie Queene was a hundred times more intense than what she put into a recent pitch for a multimillion-pound contract.
It's tempting to conclude that the exam system is wrong to inflict such pain for so little gain. It is not as if we remember the facts that we stuffed into our heads at the very last minute. On the evening of my finals, I could probably have told you about Wittgenstein's view on the indeterminacy of translation but now all I can recall is the picture that was a duck one minute and a rabbit the next.
Yet that isn't why it's all a waste. Even though I've forgotten what I learnt, I am still proud to have once known it. This seems a less shameful state of ignorance than never having known it at all.
The real problem with the exam system is that it teaches lessons about work itself that you need to unlearn pretty smartly if you want to get ahead in business.
First, it teaches you that there is a fairly straightforward relationship between effort and result. In exams, if you work very, very hard in the evenings you are going to do an awful lot better than if you spend your evenings in the pub. In most office life, this is not true. The relationship between effort and reward is much more complicated.
Second, in an exam there is nowhere to hide. If you fail you may try to pin the blame on your teachers or the examiner, but in your heart you know there is no one else to blame but yourself. You either weren't bright enough, or you didn't work hard enough.
One of the beauties of office work is that there is no shortage of candidates to blame for one's failures. Management, the market, the culture, one's colleagues, the competitors, an IT failure; the options are endless. You can screw something up royally and get away with it indefinitely. Indeed, so long as you are quite senior you can bring the entire banking system down and still get a big bonus.
The third bad lesson from exams is that failure matters. If you flunk finals you don't get the chance to do them again. Real life is much more forgiving. That presentation went badly? There will be another one along soon enough, which might go a bit better.
More dangerously still, the politics of exams are upside down. You work as hard as humanly possible while trying to unsettle fellow students by claiming to have done nothing at all.
With real work it is the other way round. The secret is to do as little as you can get away with, but make it seem that you are slogging your guts out.
In offices, people go home early and leave their jackets on their chairs and instruct their computers to send out work e-mails at 1am. There is no such thing as being seen to work too hard.
Finally, exams demand clarity of thought and expression and penalise waffle and bullshit. Whereas in business, alas, waffle and bullshit have become the gold standard.
There is, however, one thing that exams do teach you about work that is essential to remember in offices – that boys and girls are different. My daughters weep after exams, because they are girls. They say that they have done horribly badly, because they focus on the bit they got wrong rather than the bit they got right. Boys come swaggering out of exams declaring it to have been a piece of piss.
The difference is confidence. Last week, YouGov published a survey claiming that the average office worker acquires confidence at 37 after an average of 30,000 hours on the job. This is one of the worst statistics I have ever seen. Boys arriving in the workplace will profess themselves confident after the first hour. Most of my female contemporaries, thinking that work is an exam in which the full marks one wants are never quite forthcoming, are still searching for confidence at nearly 50.
考试与工作脱节
上周，我向我的女儿保证，无论她们将来从事什么工作，都永远不会像现在这般糟糕。当时是晚上10:45，她们坐在餐桌前，被有关放热反应的笔记和出自《失乐园》(Paradise Lost)的引文所包围。我向她们保证，这一切结束之后，以后遇到的事情都只是小菜一碟。工作中没有什么事情能与地狱般的普通中等教育证书考试(GCSEs)、A-level考试和期末考试匹敌。
她们轻蔑地看着我，我知道是为什么。似乎一生中最伤筋动骨的考验不太可能来得如此之早；赚钱工作这样一件严肃的任务对我们的伤害相对较轻，相反，本该更加无忧无虑的校园学习则会给人留下终生的伤疤，这太不可思议了。
然而，我上次参加期末考试已经是25多年前的事儿了，但现在仍会在夜里从梦中惊醒，不是梦到自己忘记修改答案，就是梦到被迫选了物理课，而不是哲学。我经常做的另一个噩梦是，我的所有牙齿都掉光了，但与梦到在学校的体育馆里翻阅试卷，结果发现自己不会答题时那种真切的绝望感相比，这个梦就像是在公园里散步一样惬意。
任何求职面试、可怕的呈述汇报、恐怖的餐后演说和令人崩溃的负面反馈，都不会对人的心理造成如此持久的伤害。也没有任何一个工作项目（除非你是企业律师或投资银行家）需要付出如此艰辛的努力。
我向一个在公司高层中就职的朋友提到这个问题。她说，她在温习《仙后》(The Faerie Queene)上花的功夫，比她最近为竞购一份数百万英镑合同所付出的努力要多一百倍。
我们很容易得出这样一个结论：考试制度造成如此大的痛苦，但换来的收获如此之少，证明这种制度存在问题。我们根本记不住在最后一分钟硬塞进脑子里的那些事实。在期末考试前一天晚上，我或许还能够告诉你维特根斯坦(Wittgenstein)有关翻译不准确性的看法，但现在，我只记得起那幅上一分钟还是鸭子，下一分钟却变成兔子的图片。
不过，这并不是考试制度一无是处的原因所在。尽管我曾学过的东西都忘记了，但我还是以曾经知道为傲。与从来不知道相比，这种无知状态似乎不那么可耻。
考试制度的真正问题在于，它教授了一些关于工作本身的错误知识，如果你想在商界中获得成功，你就必须很快忘却这些东西。
首先，它灌输给你一个概念，即付出与成绩是完全对等的。就考试而言，如果你每天晚上都非常、非常认真地复习，而不是泡在酒吧里，那么你的成绩就会好很多。但在大多数办公室生活中，情况并非如此。付出与回报之间的关系要复杂得多。
其次，在考试中，你无处可躲。如果你没通过，你可能会试图怪罪于你的老师或考官，但内心深处，你知道这件事不怪任何人，只能怪你自己。你不是不够聪明，就是不够努力。
工作的一个好处在于，你永远可以将你的失败归咎于其它因素：管理、市场、文化、你的同事、竞争对手、一个IT故障；选项无穷无尽。即使你把事情弄得一团糟，也能永远避开惩罚。实际上，只要你职位够高，就算你把整个银行系统都搞垮，还是可以收到巨额奖金。
考试教给我们的第三个错误概念是，失败不是无关紧要的。如果你没通过期末考试，就没有机会再考一次了。而现实生活要宽容得多。汇报做得很差？很快就会有另一场汇报了，这一次或许会好一些。
更危险的是，在考试中玩弄的政治手腕是完全颠倒的。你拼了命地学习，却声称什么都没有做，试图让你的同学感到不安。
而现实工作则截然相反。秘诀就是，能不干就不干，但要看上去在拼命工作。
在办公室中，大家都早早地回家，但把外套留在椅子上，并且指示自己的电脑在凌晨一点发送电子邮件。你要给别人留下工作努力的印象，再怎么努力都不为过。
最后，考试需要思维清晰、表述简洁，说废话是会受惩罚的。唉，然而在工作中，模糊其辞和胡说八道都已成了黄金定律。
不过，有一件事是考试教给你，而你必须在工作中谨记的——那就是男生和女生存在差异。我女儿之所以考试结束后会哭，是因为她们是女孩。她们说她们考得糟糕透顶，是因为她们只盯着自己做错的那一点地方，而不是做对的地方。男孩子们会大摇大摆地走出考场，说这不过是小菜一碟。
这就是自信心的差别。上周，YouGov公布了一项调查，称职场人士一般在平均工作3万个小时之后，即37岁时获得自信。这是我所见过的最糟糕的统计数据之一。刚进入职场的男孩仅用一小时，就会展现出自己的自信。而大多数与我同龄的女性认为工作就是一场考试，但你想要的满分永远遥不可及，因此快50岁了仍在寻找自信。
译者/董琴
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