I wanted to wait till today for this next blog, since I had the exam finally today and also as I had no choice. My laptop's been acting funny. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I never shut it down..... Yeah, I don't think so.
As I said, the wretched exam ended. It took 36 days for me to prepare for those three hours of misery. I can't decide if it was worth it. I guess it was. It was quite the experience. Not the entire month, just today's. These national examinations are very strict as far as I know. Or at least the one I wrote. Where should I start. My examination center was an institute 25 kms away to a military place (no specifics). Every candidate had to wear trousers and light-weight shirts. On the way, I saw multiple locations where there were streams of students pouring into each buildings. The same thing happened at my location. The crowd wasn't the problem though. It was the regulations that struck as odd. Now in India, we have a big problem in a few states where copying answer scripts and sharing papers is customary. This year the the examination board tightened the security and safety procedures. Two weeks back they posted a memo describing the appropriate clothes to be worn. No bracelets, bangles, necklace, earrings etc. In short no extensions of any kind. They didn't allow for phones or watches either. I had every relative of mine hammer to me the rules of the memo, so much so that I took it seriously. So after I entered the building I was pulled aside. Standard procedure. One man patted me down and found my handkerchief, made me give it to my mom. Next there was a metal detector scanned me through and through. Then, a man with a flashlight looked at my ears! I asked him for what and he said "Bluetooth devices''. I thought things that tiny only existed in spy movies or The Avengers.
We had to wait for an hour before they opened up the rooms for us to sit. The invigilators seemed very lax and bored with their duties almost as if they knew nothing could go wrong. Each candidate had separate question booklets and and answer scripts. You have to be pretty shot in the head to try to copy from other candidates. The guy in front of me copied from booklet A and my booklet C. I let him have the benefit of the doubt. If it works, it's a tragedy. You know what the real tragedy was though? One girl's answer script was deemed inadmissible as she filled in the wrong spaces by mistake. That destroyed her. God knows what her hopes were before the exam, maybe she was going to ace it, get into a good college, make her family proud. Now she has to wait a whole year. Worst was when she started to cry, that teared up other students as well. Everyone's hopes were riding on this one exam, so I guess they shared the pain too. It was bad. But now the exam's done. And I don't know what to do with my time.
We had to wait for an hour before they opened up the rooms for us to sit. The invigilators seemed very lax and bored with their duties almost as if they knew nothing could go wrong. Each candidate had separate question booklets and and answer scripts. You have to be pretty shot in the head to try to copy from other candidates. The guy in front of me copied from booklet A and my booklet C. I let him have the benefit of the doubt. If it works, it's a tragedy. You know what the real tragedy was though? One girl's answer script was deemed inadmissible as she filled in the wrong spaces by mistake. That destroyed her. God knows what her hopes were before the exam, maybe she was going to ace it, get into a good college, make her family proud. Now she has to wait a whole year. Worst was when she started to cry, that teared up other students as well. Everyone's hopes were riding on this one exam, so I guess they shared the pain too. It was bad. But now the exam's done. And I don't know what to do with my time.
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