Two days on from the exams, and looking back, it's easy to think now of how much better a job I could have done of some of the questions. In fact, even as I drove through the college gates on Monday afternoon, the word "pericarp" sprang into my mind, just as it had failed to do that morning while I was trying to sketch the cross-section of a "young dicotyledonous root". It's a moot point whether I ought even to have been drawing this, as the question, from what I recall, had asked for a drawing to show "the internal structure of a young dicotyledon root", and at least one fellow student took this to mean a longitudinal section through the root; it's always a challenge to avoid such a drawing having the look of Pompeian graffiti about it!
I certainly shouldn't have spent the last five minutes of the final paper on propagation, drawing a sketch of rose rootstocks being "stooled" to increased their number, as the question I was answering specifically asked for details of propagating suckering shrubs by division., but by the time I'd done the basics of the sketch, that was half my page for that answer covered, and most of my time used up. I found that the worst paper.
With RHS exams, you have to answer all the questions, and I find the best strategy with this type of exam is just to start at the beginning and answer the questions in order as far as possible, but skip past anything awkward, and come back to it after picking the lower-hanging fruit, so to speak. So I answered the first question, the first half of the second question, decided to revisit the second part of question 2, turned over to question 3, decided to come back to it, read question 4, decided to come back to that too, turned over to question 5, read it and moved on the question 6, which fortunately seemed to be asking about something with which I had a passing acquaintance. Hopefully some of what I've written regarding questions 2(b) to 5 bears some relation to what the examiner was asking about.
Despite that last evil paper I'm keen to continue studying, and have to decide whether to take on the RHS level 2 practical course, or stay in the classroom and do RHS level 3. At the moment I'm leaning towards the practical course starting in the autumn, with the option of tackling level 3 the year after that. An in the meantime, there's the college trip to the Netherlands in May to look forward to. And that doesn't involve exams!
