Clinging on to her schoolbag, Pauline got off the bus and joined the line of students making their way up the path to their hill-top college building. It was a beautiful saturday morning, the sun shone brightly and the mynahs were chirping happily. But nature didn’t reflect the sober mood of the line of students, who were trudging their way to their allocated test venues.
Pauline reached her allocated venue some ten minutes before the appointed hour. She greeted her classmates and sat down at her seat. Many of the gathered students were discussing which of the iterations of the topics were likely to be tested.
“Ready for the test, Pauline?”, asked her bestie.
“I hope so, I sleep at, like 3 last night,” said Pauline
“Yah, lucky my roomie woke me up, if not I’d be a goner,” her bestie said as she yawned.
“Remember, Dr Leek said do the Kirchhoff’s Law question first”, said someone else.
“Ayah, what matters is the Gauss Law question. I think they will test the Electric field through a plane surface. Cos previous years they asked the other two types. Right, Pauline?”, asked a nerdy foreign girl.
“Mhm yeah, I guess so”, Pauline replied, unenthusiastically.
“Alright, you may begin,” said the examiner.
Pauline flipped over the paper and she started to look at the questions. The next 90 minutes passed by rather uneventfully. She noticed some students getting up to go to the toilet halfway through the paper, only to return 10 minutes later. Her head was spinning. Why couldn’t she recall how to do the electron-through-charged-plates question? What, they were asking her to derive the formula for Electric field strength using the god-forsaken Biot-Savert’s Law?? And what was the Gauss Law question even asking???
Pauline tried her best to write down something for each question that she didn’t know how to do, but she knew that she was in deep trouble as the time came to an end. Slowly, students across all the examination venues came to the realisation that this paper was one of the hardest papers of the past few years.
Pauline sat there, shell-shocked. Nobody was talking, as the papers were being collected by the teacher-assistants. But all that was on Pauline’s mind was the thought of her bed. She sat at her seat, in a zombified state and unbeknownst to her, she let off some gas, which startled her bestie sitting beside her. But she didn’t care, she was going to fail this test.
—–
What you guys have read is a true story that happened earlier today. I’ve changed the name, but I hope you guys can feel the horror that we are feeling right now. I personally slept at 2.30, and woke up at 8.30am for this test. The thing is, when you try to describe the behaviour of an electromagnetic wave using a complicated equation, you’d think that you would need a few months to get used to it. We had only a few weeks.
-Selv