As the heat of exam season is turned up, don’t blame security for fire drills

On patrol around the campus where I’m based, the atmosphere currently feels more tense than usual. Students are looking up furtively from their phones. There are anxious-looking staff on site in greater numbers than there were during the last round of redundancy consultations.

It’s because final-year exam season has arrived which, according to a recent survey, causes anxiety for 85 per cent of students, with “severe stress” experienced by a quarter of undergraduates.

University staff – security included – have a duty of care to help in these anxious times. I got my first taste of the effects of pre-test stress when, after I’d been on duty for a few hours one day, a crowd of jittery students filed into the hall to begin a 9am exam.

Ten minutes later, a straggler came running up to our counter. “Which way’s the exam?” he gasped.

I pointed to the hall. The student shot into it. A minute later he shot back out.

“You got a pen I can borrow?”

Another student was so keen to arrive on time that he tried to ride his e-scooter into the exam room. When we found him and pointed out the sign saying scooters were banned from the grounds, the rider told us that his examiner had given him special dispensation.

The responding guard didn’t bother arguing: he just walked ahead of the student into the exam room, and asked who’d given Mr Scooter permission to arrive on two wheels. Of course, no one had.

I still feel relieved that, for me, exam day now means no longer being required to regurgitate information that I hadn’t swallowed. I can better handle the stress of preventing people taking selfies inside the exam hall. Or telling someone suffering a suspected asthma attack that they really don’t need to try to push through. Or even providing first aid to a girl suffering a mid-exam panic attack. I got her out of the hall, helped her with her breathing and told her classmates and her lecturer to stay away – I was wary of anything that could remind her how much pressure she was feeling.

Even academics are affected by exam stress – which can lead to arguments, especially with those ones filling in as invigilators. Some become understandably frustrated when a fire drill is carried out halfway through a test.

Our response is to point out that an inconvenient evacuation is, in itself, a form of revision: always know where your fire escapes are. This, incidentally, is especially important when a student living in halls of residence puts a pan of chips on at 10am, watches it catch alight and then throws it out of his front door in a panic, rousing hundreds of neighbours who are trying to cram.

But there’s no pleasure in watching students get reprimanded for infractions at the most important time of their academic careers. Especially when it’s down to security to respond whenever exam stress explodes into something worse.

One morning at 3am, a student came to the counter asking for a bandage. When we explained that we should probably check his injury to make sure it didn’t require more than just first aid, the student showed us the lines he’d cut into his thigh.

We dressed his wounds, gave him the speech about how showing up is more important than the final grade, and helped him set up an appointment with the well-being team.

We also managed to patch up another candidate who’d drowned his bad performance in booze and then taken a few swings at a brick wall.

Results day can be just as messy: students are known for enjoying colourful celebrations, and they don’t come more garish than showing everyone you’re now free of exam stress by pulling a hilarious celebratory prank. I presume that was the explanation for the bullets that, two years ago during exam season, someone reported finding in a car park. Luckily these turned out to be plastic; luckier still was that I got to them before an armed police response was triggered. My assumption was that they had been deliberately left there to cause pandemonium.

Nor is it a good idea to stage a celebratory sword fight using a traffic cone and a road closure sign. Drama lecturers should make it known to their students that these actions are not conducive to a good result in theatrical combat.

Of course, those students waltzing in and passing exams in forensic investigation, medieval history and rocket science are all very impressive. But I do think we on the security desk could give the law students a run for their money. In evidence, your honour, I cite the dark night during one exam season when, long after the students pulling all-night revision sessions had crashed out after their energy drinks wore off, we became aware of a first-year in the canteen with a six-pack of beers who, having just been excluded from his course, was trying to count them down to zero.

The student insisted that, as he’d purchased the drinks with his own money, he was legally allowed to consume them. We said he wasn’t because he was on licensed premises, meaning that alcohol bought off the premises can’t be consumed.

The student called the police on us. We called them too and put the contact handler on speaker. The handler told the student to either stop drinking or go home and get wasted in private. A rare occasion where security were awarded top marks.

George Bass is a security guard at a UK university. He is the author of What the Bouncer Saw: Life on the Front Line of the Security Business, which will be published in May by Little, Brown.