Chapter 56: Four School Joint Exam

If the students weren’t able to perform well – those who scored below 400 points in this exam, they would need to put in a lot more effort or else, they wouldn’t even be able to enter a junior college.

This exam was completely based on the National Higher Education Entrance Examination. Everyone’s desk was turned backward. Moreover, all the items related to the exam would need to be placed in front on the stage.

The present situation got Yang Ming pretty excited. If Yang Ming was able to successfully cheat on this exam, then he would be pretty relaxed during his National Education Entrance Examination too!

The first section was a language exam. Things that required creativity were pretty limited. Yang Ming’s bag on the stage contained a new Chinese dictionary and a book discussing the key points in the language examination. Both of the books together covered all the knowledge that was required in the whole senior high school!

Yang Ming was able to easily find the answers for the exam from his books! However, regarding the reading comprehension parts, Yang Ming referenced the answers from most of the individuals here in the examination hall and came up with a balanced answer. Because he wasn’t familiar with most of the people in the examination hall, Yang Ming didn’t really know what their standards were like so he decided to draw from all their answers.

In terms of the essay, Yang Ming couldn’t copy from the others. The topic this time was “A Magical Day”. Miracles that had happened to Yang Ming were countless, but he couldn’t write about any of these without having the examiners who graded his paper think that he was a crazy person writing nonsense. Without a choice, all he could do was create a story which had a positive value in it. Making up stories was one of Yang Ming’s strengths.

The second subject was the math exam. For this subject, Yang Ming didn’t prepare any books in his backpack that allowed him to cheat. Moreover, if he were to copy from others he would have really wasted all of Zhao Ying’s effort!

When he got the exam paper, Yang Ming was astounded! Wasn’t the person who came up with the questions a bit too lazy? This exam paper was almost identical to the one from last year that Yang Ming had answered yesterday. Nothing much had changed in the fill-in-the-blanks part, and the next few word problems only had a few numbers that were modified!

This was initially Yang Ming’s strength. Now that things were simple, Yang Ming was able to answer these easily and therefore, finished it pretty quickly. However, in terms of the multiple part questions, Yang Ming had purposely left out a few steps because if he were to score full marks that would be a bit too exaggerating!

The third subject was English and even though Yang Ming had learned quite a lot in this period of time, it wasn’t as strong as his mathematics. Therefore, Yang Ming used his cheating skills. The textbook and English dictionary were all in his bag plus there was a “Grammar Book 101” that Yang Ming could use as a reference anytime he wanted.

He didn’t have to copy from the others for English because he could find most of the answers to the exam questions in the dictionary and textbook. Any questions about grammar were found quickly in “Grammar Book 101”. He only referred to others’ answers for the listening skill part. However, he didn’t believe just anyone and once again used his gathering method and referenced about twenty people’s answers. If the majority of them picked A, he picked A. If the majority picked B, he would pick B. However, even if this was the wrong answer, he had no choice but to accept it.

On the second day, physics, chemistry, biology were all combined into one exam paper. This was the typical x in the “3+x” which was not similar to the language subjects. There were higher order problems which required some thinking. For questions regarding concepts, Yang Ming just copied from the textbook but for the remaining questions, he would have to calculate them.

Yang Ming first answered all the questions that he could do, then afterward he continued with his gathering method. If you can’t copy from one person, you copied from a group of people. Yang Ming first looked at their final answer in the subject questions, then he gathered those people with similar answers and picked one person who had the neatest procedures written down.

Of course, Yang Ming also made some reasonable changes in the answer format, or else it would be hard to explain when graders found the exact same answers.

Once he handed in the exam paper, Yang Ming felt relieved. It was pretty easy! He thought there would be some challenges but it was quite a simple task.

Yang Ming shook his head and walked out of the classroom. It seemed that obtaining a good result won’t much of a problem.

When he was walking down the stairs, he could see Chan Mengyan walking toward him from the second-floor lobby quite far ahead of him. Then he greeted her and asked, “Mengyan, how was your exam?”

“Oh, Yang Ming, you scared me!” Chen Mengyan raised her head. “Why are you shouting so loud? It looks like you’re in a pretty good mood so it seems like you did pretty well?”

“I guess it’s still fine. You know me too. If it was before, I would avoid any examinations but this time, I put in a lot of hard work. Moreover, I had you beside me and guiding me most of the time. Instead, I am actually quite excited on what kind of score would I obtain this time around!” Yang Ming’s sentence was both half-lie and half-truth. “How about you?”

“Me? I am still the same as last time. You also know it. It is hard to advance by one or two ranks!” Chen Mengyan shook her head.

Yang Ming also knew that if a student in last place was to put in a bit of effort then he could easily progress by ten or even twenty ranks. But for the students in the top ten places, it would be hard to have any kind of breakthrough because every top student was working really hard. None of them would be relaxing.

Chen Mengyan was now the number one in class, but out of the entire school, she was around number ten. It had almost been the same result for most of her big examinations.

“Hehe, actually you don’t have to worry that much. Even if you were the number one in the school, it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. With your results right now, you could enter any university!” Yang Ming was stating the truth. For the past few years, all the top thirty students were sought after by the most famous universities.

“You were quite right. I am a girl, studying a science subject could be pretty hard compared to you guys who have a clear sense of logic! You are a good example. I spent about three years, but all you took was about a month and your Math result has exceeded mine!” Chen Mengyan said, “I am actually very jealous!”

“Ah? I do not have any prejudice towards your gender. Moreover, even if I got better in my studies, most of the credit goes to you!” Yang Ming sweated.

“Hehe, I am just teasing you!” Chen Mengyan grimaced and then smiled at Yang Ming. “If I were really jealous, how could I still push you to study more?”

“Ha, I knew you are good to me!” Yang Ming said proudly.

“What? You want to die, right? What are you saying? What “I am good to you”? I am just a responsible study commissary! Don’t you be learning from a peacock!” Chen Mengyan lectured.

“Peacock? Why would I be learning from a peacock?” asked Yang Ming puzzled. Do I really look like a bird?

“A peacock would spread its tail, and feel proud of itself!” Chen Mengyan smiled. [1]

“Ah? Then I must be a male peacock, and you would be a female peacock!”

“Why?”

“I spread my tails to attract a female peacock!”

“Go die!”