Stephen Fry: How to Do Well At Exams

Posted on 19 June 2013
By Stephen Fry
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To do well at exams (in the field of literature and the arts at least) it is better to be a hedgehog than a fox, if I can borrow Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction. In other words, it is better to know one big thing than lots of smaller things.

A point of view, a single way of thinking that encompasses all elements of a subject, allows essays more or less to write themselves. The way to pass exams is to cheat. I cheated all the way through my three years at Cambridge. Which is not to say that I looked at the work of the student next to me, or that I brought in outside material from which to crib. I cheated by knowing in advance exactly what I was going to write before the invigilator bid us turn over the question sheets and started the clock.

I had a theory of Shakespearean tragic and comic forms, for example, which I won’t bore you with and which is probably specious, or at least no more truthful or persuasive an overall interpretation of Shakespeare’s forms than any other. Its virtue was that it answered any question and yet always appeared to be specific. In both of the Shakespeare papers I got a First. In fact in Part Two it was the top First for the entire university. It was essentially the same essay each time. It only takes a paragraph at the top to twist the question such that your essay answers it.

This is an extract from Stephen Fry’s The Fry Chronicles an autobiography

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