I’d have been shattered in year 12 if I’d studied the wrong Caesar for my exam. Wouldn’t you?

‘A much older person who stressed through year 12 and still vividly re-experiences its anxieties in dreams might advise those young people that school is but one gateway to a happy and productive life.’ Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian

Four decades later I still dream about my secondary school final exams as if it was yesterday. I can still sense the hellish, untameable anxiety that I carried throughout that unnecessarily demanding year when the smallest academic blip could launch me into a debilitating state of catastrophe.

So it’s no surprise that my heart goes out to those year 12 Queensland students who learned on the eve of their final history exam that they’d studied the wrong Roman emperor – Augustus rather than his great uncle Julius Caesar, upon whom the test would focus.