My highschool finals were sort of like that. They determined what schools accepted you and what didn't. I did badlyl. But there is this English exam that we also do alongside the finals and apparently I scored kinda high there so a nice school really needed to have me. That was one of the things that saved me, and it seems my math and physics grades were decent (that's what my first year college supervisor told me - they weren't decent to me) and they somehow took that into consideration.

One big reason I didn't do well in those exams was stress. Every spot, every room and every little place I tried to study suddenly didn't seem clean or orderly enough. Seriously. When did we ever care about the cleanliness of where we studied? When we were studying for something <i>really</i> important, that's when. So if that urge comes along, don't give in.