We have our first all-day test exam today, with written papers in the morning and practical this afternoon. It’s the first time I’ve done any exam papers at all for 20 years – and back then, at the age of 25, I sat in my final exam and calculated that it was exactly my 50th public exam (not counting the probably hundreds of test exams I’d sat at school and university). I promised myself on that day that I would never, ever sit another exam paper for the rest of my life.So here I am taking my 51st exam. All in French.The written parts are all based on previous CAP (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionel) exam papers but only covering what we’ve studied in the past three and a half months (three and a half months already?). So there’s a hygiene paper where we get asked about the five conditions necessary for the development of bacteria (37 degree heat, water, protein and the presence or not of oxygen), a business practices paper (calculate how much money Monsieur Marsaud has left to spend after he’s paid his rent and mobile phone bill every month) and a kitchen technology paper.The latter is the hardest for me, partly because all the vocabulary on this has been new to me this year, and partly because the photocopied photograph of a kitchen range on which we’re supposed to label everything is smudged into an indistinguishable grey mush. So that thing down the end is either a deep-fat fryer or a bain marie. I plump for the latter, and it turns out to be a sauteuse. There you go.The practical this afternoon is what we all see as more important. It’s the only ‘failing’ section of the exam – fail any other part and you can still make up the marks you need elsewhere; fail the practical and you fail the exam completely. Which is as it should be. Continue reading →