Today, as soon as I walked out of the civil service exam hall, I felt like I had failed again. Upon carefully summarizing the reasons for this exam failure, I realized that history is eerily similar.
I always feel like these years of taking various exams have been a continuous tragedy, but I can’t quite figure out why.
The first college entrance exam (yes, I repeated a year later), the essay topic was “Discussing Spirit.” I ended up adapting a satirical article from a 2006 issue of “Microcomputer” (or maybe “Computer Enthusiast,” I can’t remember) about why a 40GB hard drive shows up as 37.2GB in the system. I definitely remember regretting it as I wrote, and I clearly remember that before writing this essay, I had started another piece, only to find myself unable to continue after a few hundred words, so I scribbled it out and wrote this one instead. This topic also filled me with regret as I wrote, and as a result, I only scored 101 in Chinese that year, just a few points shy of the undergraduate cutoff.
The second college entrance exam, the essay topic was “A Poetic Life,” and I continued to mess up. I started by discussing patriotism and love for the people around “Li Sao,” but then I found I couldn’t continue, so I scribbled it out and started over. The new topic revolved around the “Great Learning” from the Four Books and Five Classics (since I had memorized this ancient text before), fantasizing about how to live a poetic life in college. This time, my Chinese score was slightly better at 110, but I think if my essay had scored a bit higher, getting into a top-tier university would have been normal, as I was only a few points short.
Last year, in the fourth paper of the judicial exam, I only scored 81 (90 is passing). The main reason was that I wrote one of the long answers in the wrong section of the second paper, causing me to rewrite the entire answer and waste a lot of time. This directly led to a timing mistake in the last question. Although I finished writing, the content was clearly off-topic because I didn’t even read the question and just answered based on administrative law knowledge. In the end, my judicial exam score was stuck at 351!!
This civil service exam had three essay questions!! As soon as I got the paper, I circled “the taxi industry” and was delighted, as I was very familiar with this topic… So I quickly found the relevant material, wrote a draft on scratch paper, and then copied it onto the exam paper. Then I moved on to the second question, and tragedy struck! The “taxi industry” topic was actually the second question on the exam paper, and the first question… was above it. By the time I copied the draft onto the correct space and went back to the first question, I only had about 100 spaces left, but the requirement was within 200 words.
This has been my experience with exams over the years—every time, I make major mistakes during the exam, often at the most critical moments. I don’t know how long this streak of bad luck will continue, but I do know that each of the frustrating experiences listed above has, to varying degrees, altered my fate. Is there really some kind of curse binding me?
Upon closer analysis of my mindset before and after these exams, I discovered a significant issue.
In any of the exams mentioned above, at the very beginning of my preparation, I often had long-term plans and ideals. But as the exam approached, for various reasons, I would lower these goals. Before the first college entrance exam, I aimed for universities like Renmin University or Maritime University, but several poor pre-exam scores gradually eroded this goal, and it was eventually lowered to just getting into any undergraduate program. The exam then mercilessly informed me that even undergraduate programs were out of reach, and I could only get into a vocational school. During my repeat year, for the first few months, I aimed for a good first-tier university, but several monthly exams showed me the limits of my abilities in each subject. No matter how hard I tried, I could only score so much, and it seemed like getting into a first-tier university was still possible. But the absurd reality was that there are always unexpected factors in the college entrance exam, like my math score, which had never been below 125 in the past year, suddenly dropping to 102.
As for the judicial exam, early in my preparation, I thought passing it wouldn’t be difficult. But the more I studied, the less confident I became, until about two months before the exam, I completely broke down and stopped studying. Although there were some family factors involved, I did relax for over a month at the most critical time, so in the last month, I was just going through the motions of studying.
Finally, the civil service exam. I started preparing before even registering (though it was already quite late). I had made some good plans and was almost certain I had a high chance of getting into the prison system, only to find out I was colorblind and couldn’t apply for that system. So I broke down again, casually applied for a position in a peripheral area of the Pearl River Delta, and didn’t pay much attention to it.
Unfortunately, the carefree attitude I had before each exam turned into deep frustration afterward. No matter what, I can’t seem to find that relaxed pre-exam mindset again. Sigh.