AVOID listening to other people’s advice, would be my advice.

It is exam results day and look, forget about the contents of that text message for a moment and pity the poor photographers the country over having to find new and interesting ways of demonstrating exam success.

The jig was up years ago on the old “attractive young women jumping for joy” photo opp.

So now poor photogs are schlepping off to high schools hoping some enthusiastic teacher has cut out giant cardboard As while praying for sets of photogenic, high-achieving twins.

I sometimes wonder if we – schools and newspapers – fetishise gluts of A -grades from young people simply because they’re easiest to illustrate. How do you sum up “I worked my backside off to get one B and two Cs and now I’m going to college because university isn’t for me, it isn’t for lots of young people, and we shouldn’t be made to feel like second-class citizens because of it” in one image?

Not so easy, not even with giant cardboard letters.

Maybe triplets would help, on account of being able to hold up the most expansive flash cards.

READ MORE: SQA exam results: Pupils across Scotland to find out grades 

Remembering exam hell should be a universal leveller, but of course, it isn’t because our education system is far from being a universal leveller.

Some people will remember being well prepped by private tutors and surrounded by hard-working peers in an environment where results matter because results paid wages.

Others will remember a teacher from another class sneaking in to write Ode to Autumn on the blackboard and having you memorise it ahead of the Higher English exam because she knew your actual class teacher just wasn’t that into the whole teaching thing and you were all likely going to fail without a dramatic intervention.

Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness came in very handy for passing the exam, indeed, but then what?

While I cannot envy young people having to sit exams – never, never again, thank you – what I do envy them is the push to lay out all options before them.

More and more young people from Glasgow now are going to Oxbridge – still in tiny numbers, but tiny increasing numbers.

Not because pupils from days before were not achieving the necessary marks, but because now young people are being encouraged to see all options as open to them, no matter their class or background.

Last year I interviewed a young woman from a Glasgow comprehensive who was going to study in America.

I would never in a million years have thought that Oxbridge might have been possible for me, that New York or California might have been possible for me.

I’m so glad that we are telling our working class, state-educated young people that the world is really their oyster and that nothing is off-limits.

University, though, is not for everyone, not even those who are high academic achievers. It would be wonderful, on results day, if this was more widely recognised. That going to college or into the workplace with fewer Highers and National 5s had just as much value.

There are pupils now getting six or seven Highers in the one year. This is a stellar achievement and, of course, down to hard work. But a degree of luck is involved that you’ve happened to have been born with an academic brain.

Some of us might work our very socks off and never be able to achieve six A grades. And what of those who feel six A s are a certainty but who come away with less than they were expecting?

This is where not listening to advice comes in. Everyone will be ready to step in with a story about how disappointment makes a person stronger. Or how an unexpected result pushed them on a path better than the route they planned to take. They will say that it is not the end of the world.

Rot. It is the end of the world as you know it, whether the results are what you planned or not.

It is the end of the time when exam results matter and when the next stage of life is yet to begin.

After an intense and stressful time, studying, sitting exams, it very rapidly becomes apparent how the meaning of these results depreciates.

People will tell you that, ultimately, school exam results cease to matter. It’s a complicated argument because yes, practically, there will come a point when your Higher results simply do not matter any more, yet they will always matter as a step to what you do next.

You have to decide for yourself how seminal these results are, how to make or break, and whether they mould you stronger or alter your plans for the better.

I imagine it would help the decision-making process if university wasn’t perpetually touted as the highest marker of success.

Exam results are only one marker of success. It’s the most annoying of all the stock phrases yet the one that is most true: you can only do your best and if you have done your best, then forget giant letters and jumping blazers: you’re the highest achiever.