It was a clear, sunny day when I peered out the window adjacent to my desk and there, in plain sight, the hostel's jacaranda trees were in full flowering. After spending two years in a hostel at my former high school, my classmates and I had come to associate the blooming of jacaranda trees with a sign of the start of midterm exams. It's ironic how every time I looked at the beautiful scenery formed by the blooming jacarandas, it sent shivers all over my body as exams approached instead of enjoying Mother Nature. Exams were upon us and all that could be heard throughout the hostel in the different dorms, was the frantic flipping through pages as we all tried to maximize our “last minute study” time. For example, I had procrastinated and was trying to "fill" my brain with all my notes and complex formulas in preparation for the intermediate chemistry exam I had to take the next day. The time has come to face "our demons". When my classmates and I entered the exam room and by the looks on people's faces, we could almost accurately distinguish those who were prepared for the exam and those who were not. Nonetheless, we all sat at our designated seats and took the exam under the watchful eye of the inspector. After a few weeks, our teacher gave us back the exam results which were in their own way a lot of surprises as they were nicknamed because the smart students had scored poorly on the exam and the not so smart students had scored high . My teacher was perplexed by these results and to help him fully understand what had happened he asked each student for honest feedback on the exam. He soon discovered that the reason my classmates (his best students) and I were… halfway down the paper… “Take a test to really learn, research suggests.” The New York Times. The New York Times, January 20, 2011. Web. March 27, 2014. BBC. 'Abuse' of education bans exam says teacher." BBC News. BBC, 27 July 1999. Web. 27 March 2014. Bhatia, Roshni. "Should exams be replaced with other forms of assessment?" Forum by ManagementParadisecom Your Online MBA Degree Program and Management Student Forum for MBABMS MMS BMM Aspiring BBA Students RSS VbulletinSolutions, Inc, October 4, 2006. Web. March 27, 2014.Hasan, Mahdi is better suited for purpose." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 17 December 2011. Web. 27 March 2014. Robinson, Ken, Lord. "Are exams an effective form of assessment in education?" The Badger. Cambridge, 7 September 2009. Web. 27 March. 2014.