42. The Underachiever’s Exam Strategy

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The test consisted of five pages, with a total score of three hundred points: one hundred for the liberal arts section, one hundred for the sciences, and the remaining hundred divided among Chinese, mathematics, and English. Although Ms. Tong had said there were four hours allotted for the exam, which sounded generous enough, in reality...

Chen Ruowen quickly skimmed through all five pages. There were no multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions, only essays and analytical questions, plus a major composition. Completing all the questions within four hours was, for all practical purposes, impossible.

Yet Chen Ruowen was not someone who would panic easily. She spent five minutes reviewing the distribution of scores on the exam and made a rough calculation on her scratch paper.

Although everyone present had their academic strengths and weaknesses, considering the late division of classes and the difficulty of the test, to achieve a decent ranking in this round, she would need at least... around one hundred and fifty to sixty points.

Of the major subjects, Chinese made up forty points, with thirty for the composition and ten for reading comprehension. The remaining sixty points were split evenly between mathematics and English. Mathematics featured four major application problems, each worth six to ten points. As for English... Chen Ruowen was a little surprised to see that twenty points were allocated to the essay and ten to the cloze test.

Since she had been preparing for studying abroad since kindergarten, Chen Ruowen's English was quite strong—good enough to read original foreign novels. These thirty points would pose no difficulty for her.

Even if her Chinese composition wasn't great, she could still expect to get more than twenty points, and with the reading comprehension, thirty points should be within reach.

She decided to skip the science section entirely. The liberal arts questions weren’t particularly difficult, but there were a lot—a total of fifteen, all requiring lengthy, discursive answers.

Chen Ruowen had always been too lazy to memorize things, but she had a strategy for exams: remember a few key points, elaborate at length, and hope to hit enough main ideas to score a few points.

Based on her calculations, following her usual approach, it would take about two and a half hours to finish these sections, leaving her with over an hour to pick and choose among the remaining questions.

Resolved, Chen Ruowen quickly turned the test to its last page.

The examiners were quite cunning, placing the most difficult science questions on the first page, with the major subjects on the last two. Most people, by habit, would leave the composition until last.

If one spent most of the time wrestling with the tough problems at the beginning, those easy thirty points from the composition could easily slip away.

Chen Ruowen glanced at the essay prompt, closed her eyes to think for a few seconds, then her pen flew across the page, soon filling the classroom with the sound of writing.

Most people, following their usual habits, battled their way from the front, but the opening physics question was so hard that, despite the winter cold, many foreheads were already sweating, and their scratch papers were covered in dense formulas.

Some spent twenty or thirty minutes and filled an entire sheet of scratch paper, yet still couldn’t solve the first question, only realizing how quickly time was passing before hastily skipping ahead.

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Some of the sharper students, after calculating their time, adopted a strategy similar to Chen Ruowen’s: first scan the exam, choose the section they were best at or which had the highest points to tackle first, and leave the rest for later.

“Teacher, I’ve run out of scratch paper.”

As time passed, more and more students began raising their hands for extra paper. Meanwhile, except for her initial quick calculations, Chen Ruowen’s scratch paper remained spotless.

Calmly flipping the test back a page, Chen Ruowen spent only a minute or two reading through the cloze passage that would leave most people’s minds spinning, then filled in the missing words and phrases without a second thought.

“This year’s major subjects seem pretty easy…” Chen Ruowen remarked carelessly.

No memorizing poems, no classical translations, no remembering which author was born in which year, their representative works, or the mood in which they were written… With these requirements, the difficulty for Chen Ruowen dropped by half.

Of course, she hadn’t looked at the math questions yet.

History and politics were typical open-ended questions—hard to score high, but guaranteed at least some points. Given a slew of materials, they asked about the significance of various historical phenomena, the background, process, and inner connections of cultural events.

Aside from a few questions for which Chen Ruowen actually knew the answers, she wrote generic, all-purpose responses for the rest, making sure her handwriting was neat, her papers clean, and each answer filled at least eighty percent of the space.

This was a test-taking strategy Bai Jingyan had taught her back in middle school.

For liberal arts, if you didn’t know the answer, just write as much as possible and make it tidy; teachers would feel awkward deducting too many points. For sciences, pile on the formulas, and you’d always get something.

Chen Ruowen ended up spending a bit more time than she’d estimated, and when she returned to the math section, she encountered a surprise: two major questions were exactly the ones Bai Jingyan had highlighted for her!

Although it had been some time since then, Chen Ruowen still remembered what Bai Jingyan had taught her quite clearly. For parts she couldn’t recall, she analyzed them herself, and miraculously solved both questions completely.

As for the remaining two, she had no clue.

She filled them with a few formulas, and finally turned her attention to the science section she’d left untouched.

“…What’s the scattering angle of alpha particles striking gold foil? How does this relate to the planetary model? Gravitational potential energy analogy… This is all nonsense!”

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Chen Ruowen, utterly frustrated, skipped the question she couldn’t even comprehend and continued scanning ahead.

“…Calculate the position of the spaceship… Forget it, no idea.”

“…Forget it, no idea.”

“…Forget it…”

“…Describe the physical and chemical properties of Po, its nuclear decay equation, and at least three of its practical applications.”

This question was short, seemingly easier. Chen Ruowen picked up her pen, paused, and put it down again.

So, what is Po?

Wasn’t the exam supposed to cover only the first twenty elements in the periodic table? What is this?

The bell rang, signaling the end of the exam, catching everyone off guard. Students didn’t even have time to wipe the sweat from their foreheads, hastily scribbling whatever they could onto the answer sheets.

Ms. Tong clapped her hands twice, reminding everyone to pass their papers from the back to the front, but most of the tests seemed glued to the desks, hardly moving. She had to urge them again, “If you don’t hand them in, I’ll mark them all as zero,” finally collecting her own paper with an air of, “Why are you all so nervous about a little quiz?”

“All right, the results will be announced tomorrow morning. Go home and enjoy yourselves!”

Enjoy…

Yourselves…

Ha! Enjoy what, exactly?