$25 in just 3 hour

Just Monday’s morning, I had made $25, relatively effortlessly. The way I do it is idiot-proof but still took me 3 hours and plenty of fidgeting. But in retrospect, it still amused me.

What I did was to become a ‘beta’ tester for two sets of university entrance exam. Just last week, I received an email from a certain Dr. Tay who told me that I was eligible to help him test out the quality of the two sets of exam papers targeted at China students. It was supposedly A-level standard Physics and Maths. HaHA, sounds so innocent. I told him I’m probably not the best candidate (I did not take A-level physic and my Maths skill is currently as sharp as my pet tofu) but he didn’t seem to mind it. So why should I mind.

The deal goes like this; I will take a two-hour Maths Paper followed by an hour of Physics and the final score will not affect my CAP. At the end of the 3 hours, I will be paid $25. If my results happen to be among the top three, I will be awarded another $50.

And here’s what I have to say…WAIT LONG LONG AH.

Here’s what Really happen: I went to the venue and realised that I was among at least 50 people, majority of them are not Singaporean. Not that I’m harbouring thoughts of hate crimes, but these foreign guys are really the elites for sciences and maths. So hope of that $50 is gone. I have lost my first battle before the war had started.

So we started out with Maths paper first. I remember the anticipation. Maths is always my best subject in school and had never failed to ‘A’ for major exams. But I soon realised why I could perform so well then…because I had daily practice/exposure, which is exactly what I’m lacking now. 10 MCQs and 4 open-ended questions, and I had no answers for all 14 qns. Come on man, it is all graphs, trigonometry, more triangles, and inequalities plus one permutation problem. I can’t help laughing to myself, ‘Kun Song, you piece of dumb ass, now you are stuck on the desk for the next two hours with a piece of rocket science test paper. If you aren’t greedy for $25, all these won’t have happen….’ But it did, so I decided to attempt a few questions. Turn out that I still remember a few chapters, especially permutation. Since I had too much time on hand, I ended up pondering over this deal. Maybe this test is just a façade to observe what students will do under academic test, maybe there are hidden cameras around, or it may be a conspiracy to rig our mind with the hypnotic arrangement of graphs, triangles and numbers. Worst of all, this may be an introductory test to spark our curiosity for the department’ modules and force us to drop our courses and join them instead. Well, apparently it works on me. I really want to know the answer to some seemingly easy questions. This is what happen when your body is rooted but your mind is wandering, creativity will get out of hand and radicalism takes its stand.

Anyway, physics comes next. Much better, at least the module I took during the Special Term helps, not much though. At least it is less conceptual than Maths and consists of 34 MCQs only.But I only have the confidence for 3 questions. It’s back to ‘spinning the pencil’ for the answers to the other 31 questions.
Not that bad, I managed to survive the three hour test and earn $25 bucks amidst the conspiracy theories and some really bad experience.