It was not, I concede, a foolproof plan.
Four decades ago, having failed to pay attention to a single thing in the few classes I’d bothered to attend, I got out of bed at five am on the day of my ‘O’ Grade chemistry examination and tried to learn two year’s worth of course-work before breakfast.
A couple of hours later, and struggling to grasp even the simplest scientific concept, I came up with an idea I was sure would see me through.
Messily, I scratched out the periodic table of the elements in black ink on the inside of my left forearm. Armed – quite literally – with this information, I would be able to decipher the various compounds being described in the paper.
But teenage boys are disgusting sweaty creatures and by the time I was sitting at the back of the exam hall my handiwork had become an indecipherable black smudge.
I failed the exam and ruined a shirt.
Forty years later, my two are in the thick of it all. The boy is halfway through his National 5s and his big sister has one Higher left before she starts her sixth-year course work.
They are handling things considerably better than I did. There have been long study sessions and missed nights out and, so far, not a single shirt has been ruined.
In my two, I see a seriousness of purpose that I did not possess at their age. I detect it, too, in many of their friends.
I’m grateful and relieved because, boy, they’re going to need it.
It is customary, and tiresome, for each generation to reckon those coming after have it easy. Young people, say fools of my age, don’t know they’re born.
But the kids going through their Nat 5s and Highers right now are under far greater pressure than we were back in the mid 1980s.
My two have university in their plans and I’ll be unbearably proud if they make it. But even if they do, they – in common with the vast majority of young Scots – will still face challenges I didn’t.
In the 1980s, University was not the be-all-and-end-all. My generation had options unavailable to kids, today.
In those days, a decent degree was as close as one could get to a golden ticket into the world of well-paid work but for those of us who didn’t make the academic grade for Higher Education, there were valuable opportunities elsewhere.
Apprenticeships in the trades were more plentiful and there were traineeships in the worlds of banking and insurance that allowed teenagers to step on the professional ladder without the need for a BA.
I know people who started on those five-grand-a-year jobs who’re now contemplating comfortable retirements in their mid-50s (They would also allow you, in the ‘80s, to become a journalist with qualifications that wouldn’t get you a start in a coffee shop, today. For this, I am still thankful).
Today, a degree may be useful in terms of broadening the mind but for most young people, it appears to confer no particular advantage when it comes to getting on the career ladder.
I’m not, I should stress, a “bloody students” sort, worked up about “pointless” degrees. I firmly believe that Higher Education in itself is of huge value. Learning for learning’s sake is a fine thing.
Three or four years spent examining new ideas and learning some critical thinking would, I know, have done me a world of good.
What’s more, Uni looks like a lot of fun and why shouldn’t young people enjoy that?
In the academic year 2022-23, there were 292,240 higher education students in Scotland. Of those, 173,745 were from Scotland, while 83,975 were from outside the UK.
Those statistics presents a picture of a Higher Education system in rude health. The reality is somewhat different.
The SNP makes much of its free tuition fees policy, insisting it opens up university education to young Scots who would otherwise be denied life changing opportunities.
But, in order to make the numbers add up, there is a limit on the number of places available to Scottish students. Universities must balance the books with ever-increasing numbers of fee-paying students from overseas.
Currently, two of Scotland’s universities – Edinburgh and St Andrews – have more foreign students than Scottish ones.
The astronomical sums handed over by students from outside Scotland are vital to ensuring universities survive.
This policy, say some lecturers I know, means not simply that spaces for Scottish students are limited but that it is more difficult than ever for kids who live here to find places in what we might think of as the more prestigious courses.
The facts of the matter are that ambitious, wealthy students from China or the USA do not, as a rule, spend tens of thousands of pounds a year in order to learn gender studies or public relations. Rather, they – quite understandably – look to medicine and the sciences, areas where Scotland needs more workers.
The free tuition policy was supposed to open higher education to all but, in reality, it has limited opportunities, particularly in those fields where graduates can expect to earn the highest salaries.
A recent survey by the Institute of Student Employers around that newly-advertised graduate-level jobs receive an average of 140 applications each.
And if the future looks uncertain for those who make it to Uni, it’s worse for those who don’t.
Figures published by the Scottish Funding Council in February showed that the number of college places in Scotland fell by more than 8,000 last year to the lowest total in almost a decade.
In 2023-24, Scotland’s colleges delivered 116,602 full-time equivalent college places.
One needn’t have a degree to understand what has happened. In order to support and sustain its shiny free university tuition policy, the Scottish Government has hollowed out the further education sector.
The upshot of this is that while Scotland is producing record numbers of graduates, we are not giving enough young people opportunities that work for them or meet the needs of our economy.
For all the SNP’s talk of closing the attainment gap, those who pay the price for this situation are those from the least privileged backgrounds.
As I write this, the girl has her head in a physics textbook and the boy is working through maths past papers. They have a focus they did not inherit from me.
Both are enthusiastic about the subjects they’ve picked for next year and both have started to talk about what they might like to do for a living.
If they’re to achieve their ambitions, they will require grades of which I could only have dreamed when I was at school.
Of course, I’m sure they’ll succeed.
But just say they don’t, what then? What good will all this work do if they lose a Uni place because of Scottish Government-imposed quotas?
Across Scotland, more than 130,000 teenagers are in the middle of a gruelling exam timetable. Their results will matter much more than those I “achieved” 40 years ago.
I wish them all the very best of luck. They’re going to need it, no matter how good their grades are.