Final Exam (Slight Return)

So last Friday was my final exam. Most kok exam I have ever done. Seems like my teachers are afraid that I will fail or only pass with mediocre grades because if that happens, we will stop sending people to their school and they'll lose a huge source of income (yeah, they fleece us).

So anyway, reading exam. One week before the exam, the reading teacher tells me very matter-of-factly that the topic for the exam will be about Singapore's development of Batam. Pretty much like one of the passages we read a week earlier. She suggests that I can go through the passage one more time. Right. Two days before the reading exam, she says she wants to go through the passage one more time before the exam, "just to check" if I am familiar with the "terminology". On the day of the exam, I find that the reading comprehension passage is just a simplified version of the passage she made me read earlier. What's more, during the exam she's reading a huge newspaper so she can't see me. Since there's a word I'm not sure of, and she can't see, I sneak a peek at my electronic English-Indonesian dictionary. No sweat.

Then there's the grammer exam. Three days before the exam the teacher gives me a "pre-test" to "check" my standard. Then on the day of the exam, he hands me the paper and says "if you have any words you don't know, feel free to ask me". First time I kenah exam where you can ask the teacher if you don't know the words.

After that was the vocab exam. Apart from choosing the topics for the exam beforehand, the teacher comes into the class, hands me the paper and says "I'm going to go out and run some errands for a while. I might come back but IF (widens eyes) I don't come back, you can just hand in the completed paper to the secretary in the office." And he grabs all his stuff and walks quickly out of the class. Fuck it. I use the dictionary again. But only for the words I don't know la. I'm not totally dishonest.

And then lastly is my writing teacher. I write my essay and the teacher corrects it immediately. After reading through it and circling a few grammatical errors, he asks me, "so what grade you want me to give you?"

Personally I take it as a personal insult that all my teachers don't have enough confidence in me to trust that I can pass the exam without their help. But then who cares? I got an A.