Brought me back to the time when we were all in school - national exams. Mom would never fail to prepare a bottle of Brand's Essence of Chicken every morning, moderately warmed after being submerged in hot water earlier. Never knew if they were of any good but what the heck - I actually like the taste whilst some of my friends would rather die than take a sip.
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| "I'd rather vacuum my room than drink your chicken piss!" |
The tables in the classroom would already been arranged and separated from one another days before, we would all sit in alphabetical order. Once ready, the teacher on duty will distribute the papers to the first person on each row - like a Mexican wave we would then pass the rest of the paper to the back, wait for the signal and start the exams proper.
Something noticeably absent nowadays is the competitive spirit between students due to the emphasis on 'equality' and 'individual brilliance' - by the time the paper is over, the ultra competitive ones in my class would seize our question papers and calculate the expected marks, tallying them up before the full results are revealed a week or so later.
I actually like this environment for some reason as it felt good to have your paper taken away for 'grading' because it signifies that your average marks can move and shake the positions in class. Due to the nature of my classmates and I being in the top class of potentially the district, the difference between positions are often very small to the point of 0.1 in magnitude. Every little bit counts. Being 1st in class mattered back then.
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| "Oh, you finished first in class seven times in a row? Awesome". |
I was never the smartest kid in class but I deliver when it mattered - I don't do very well in individual subject/topic exams during mid terms but would usually do quite good in overall during the actual terms exams.
Languages
If anything, I love open ended essays. You're given a topic which you are free to write about anywhere you want. To score though, you'll have to break from the pack and compose differently - teachers are bored of reading the same kinds of essays over and over; any kind of change in direction is bound to get their attention and shine above the rest.
If I recall correctly the open ended essay of our trial BM paper asked the students to write about a memorable holiday vacation. I'd imagine many of the classmates to began with a description of a trip somewhere with friends or family, what they did and how they felt at the end of it. Instead, I wrote about myself at a resort chalet ahead of my family and strange happenings that happened during the evening, together with the invention of a local urban legend of a loyal housekeeper. To cut short a long story, the old man who told me about the legend was supposed to have died ten years ago...
Even if my grammar is pretty atrocious, I had the flair to pull it off. My essays are often selected as one of the several examples of good ones stapled to the class notice board, red crosses and markings from spelling or structure errors et al.
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| "Who are you calling atrocious you little... oh.. sorry..". |
Science & Mathematics
One of my favourite subjects although I was never very good at them, mostly due to the time needed for me to really understand a concept - an entire academic year would usually be needed, or more depending on how quickly they click into place.
Mathematics is great because once you understand the method, no memorisation is required anymore. A few classmates and I would usually buy many of those question books and do them all together with the help of teachers, labouring through hundreds of examples to get the formula and mechanics correct.
I still remember the time when we didn't have scientific calculators to do our math with, instead we had what are called 'Log(arithm) Books' or Buku Sifir that has pages of calculations for values that imitate what a calculator does but in manual format. The tables that are popular includes square roots of numbers as well as logn values. Good thing our teachers back then weren't sadists whom would prepare questions that will result in values with infinite decimal points, rather they'd usually end up as some form of rational number or fractions e.g 1/√2
Physics was fun but was never very good with it, same goes with chemistry. Biology however, was one of my pet peeves due to the amount of memorisation that needs to be done. Suffice to say my dad's "dream" of me becoming a surgeon remained all but a dream as I simply gave up on that subject... Surprising my scores for Biology was above average even when I just chose on what to read and concentrate in.
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| I can doctor pictures pretty good with Photoshop though. |
Social Studies
History is by far one of my favourite subjects as whilst being one of most hated of all papers for a lot of my friends. I approach Sejarah like reading a novel or story book, so not only was it (mildly) enjoyable, I tend to remember the important points better that way.
Back then the questions were not very date oriented - a lot of it asks about the reasons behind a historical event, what happened and the aftermath or effects it had in the future; rarely where there questions asking specifically when was the first atomic bomb dropped into Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the date when the first Malaya National Elections were held - the cause, effect and consequences had greater emphasis than the chronological data.
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| Comic book equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr, but bald. |
As for Geography, neither liked nor disliked it.
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The funny thing about exams is that you tend to become really good at it when it's no longer important? I'm pretty certain if given some time to refresh and read through some of the material, I'd score really good compared to back then. I can still solve some Additional Math questions easily when our younger friends show them to us and could explain some of the concepts in Physics with better understanding now than before.
I suppose the exams were a little too early for our immature little brains.
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