Yesterday was the day I've been waiting for since I sat down and took my first French exam 100 days before. Results Day.

My school opened at 8AM for us to go and collect our results although I was awake and nervous several hours before, as I walked in I met up with a few of my friends who had massive grins on their faces as they had done really well and I was so happy for them because they've all worked so hard for the grades they achieved.

I was given the dreaded brown envelope which contained months of hard work, sweat and most definitely tears. I was almost sure that I'd failed three subjects: English Literature, General Studies and French but when I opened my envelope and looked at my results I was over the moon to see that I'd passed everything. My results were as follows:

 When I opened my results I was so pleased with the grades, my mock grades gave me the final push I needed to prove to myself and other people that I could do it. I've really struggled through a few subjects over the past 2 years of GCSE- Maths, Chemistry and English. Although I feel like I'm a lot better at Maths than I am English we've had 3 different teachers over the past 2 years and each of them have been as bad as each other. My friend and I tried our hardest to achieve an A in maths and I was completely overjoyed when both of us got it. Even though I got an A in both of my English exams I'm still more than happy that I never have to do it again, I'm one of those people who enjoys learning facts and being able to apply these facts to my exams. In English however there's barely any facts to learn you just have to be able to explore your own thoughts and feeling toward the question that is being asked and as somebody who isn't very creative this isn't something that I do particularly well. I've struggled with Chemistry for the past 2 years and I had a breakdown on the first week of year 10 because I didn't understand a thing the teacher was talking about. I dreaded going to every single lesson, the lessons were boring and the teacher just confused me but one of my friends gave me a pep talk before the exam. She told me that if I didn't understand Chemistry from the start of year 10 I was never going to understand it so I should stop trying to understand it and just learn the facts which sounds as though she was telling me to give up but she wasn't. I took her advice and just learned the facts, I read the revision guide again and again until I'd learnt the facts, I didn't understand why any of these reactions were happening but I knew that they just happened. This helped me get through my exam because I stopped stressing about why things happened and I had to understand that as I far as I was concerned they just happened for no reason.

5 TIPS TO ALL YEAR 11'S:
I thought I'd mention 5 important things that I learnt in year 11 that I feel like everybody should know.

1. REVISE EARLY.
I'm one of those people who likes to revise everything and go through my revision guide from page to page. Even if I think I know the topic I'll still go over it again just in case there is any extra information that I could remember that could give me some extra marks. I started revising after February half term for my exams in May and even so I don't think this was early enough. By the time I got to my last few exams I felt completely unprepared compared to the first couple so I'd say you need to structure your revision to make sure you cover all of your subjects even if you think the exam is really far away and you don't need to revise yet. You do.

2. DO NOT RELY ON YOUR COURSEWORK.
I went into every exam thinking that even if I failed I still had the coursework I'd done to fall back on and it could bring my grade up. Don't do this. My advise is go into your exam thinking that your coursework is a grade C or D and that you need to get an A* in your exam to help bring up your grade. In my Health and Social coursework I was told that my coursework was an A* and it turned out to be a B when it was sent off which goes to show that if I'd taken it easy in the exam and not put 100% effort in then my grade wouldn't have turned out the way I wanted it to.

3. LISTEN IN YOUR LESSONS.
As much as I enjoyed sitting next to my friends in my lessons I know that I would have achieved much better grades if I concentrated a lot more and kept the gossip to the corridors at break and lunch time. I know that some lessons are tedious and it's so easy to get distracted and start talking to your friends about the latest episode of 'Pretty Little Liars' but in the long run if you don't get the grades you want then you're going to regret not listening to your teacher when she was teaching you how to do the question that comes up in your exam every single year and those were the marks you needed to bring your exam from a fail to a pass.

4. KEEP YOUR FRIENDS.
I find that the most important thing at school is your friends, as stressed as you are and as much as you bite at them when they do something that annoys you, you need to know that you wouldn't be able to get through your exams without them. You have to remember that they are also taking the same exams as you and they're probably just as stressed as you are- even if they don't show it. You need to appreciate you friends during exam season and you need to let them know that you appreciate them before it's too late and you've lost them. I honestly couldn't have got through my exams without my friends and our Starbucks dates on the weekends for a few hours while we tried and forget about exams.

5. HAVE TIME TO RELAX.
Revising none stop is a really unhealthy thing to do throughout exams and no matter how stressed you are about needing to learn everything on the syllabus you also need to de-stress and do something you enjoy. My main piece of advice here is you set yourself time to revise every night, for example revise from when you get home from school until 6:30PM and then run a bath or do a hobby such as going for a swim or watching your favourite TV series to get your mind off revision because it's going to be impossible to remember 5 or 6 pages worth of stuff every night and you're going to make yourself ill. Learning facts is ten times easier to do when you have an open mind and you're not stressed.

To any other GCSE students reading this- I hope you are really happy with your results and good luck in the future :)