Pre & Post Holiday Exams

A little review of my school's performance so far....

The 2 weeks summer holiday is said to be sandwiched between 2 exams, before and after the holiday.

To cut things short from the pre-holiday exam, here's the result of the Japanese language exam.



Overall it was ~89%, with the teacher's comment "Had worked hard in studies, able to apply the language well. Please continue on with the good work!"

Personally I find it quite good but I still can do better in it. If it wasn't because of the blunder in the essay (off topic at the last paragraph), I would be more happy bout it.

School resumes this week onwards, and it was rather crazy to had another round of exam right after the summer holiday.

This time, other subjects were being included as well instead of the Japanese language only. I took General Subjects (consist of Geo, Socio and Econ subjects) and Maths.

Again to cut things short, here's the result of the Japanese language exam. No official slip though this time, just teacher wrote down the result for us.



~91%, slightly better than the previous exam given it's slightly trickier than the previous language exam, was kinda happy bout it. Hmm.... continue to work hard from this onwards too! :)

Talk about the other 2 subjects, the General Subjects paper was kinda interesting to deal with. First few pages were loaded with lots of badly-formatted questions with rather unclear instruction to ask us choose the answers.

My Japanese language is still not that good so I have to took a little time to digest word by word. Noticed that there's lots of BS before the line that leads you to the REAL question of the topic.

I think I can score better at the historical part, especially when it asked about the recent years' history, such as those of World Wars or related to the Cold War between USA & Soviet Union.

This is also the first time I came across Economics questions as such, the famous Supply, Demand & Price graph.


Not sure whether I did correctly or not, but it's actually interesting to study bout it. Need someone who studied Econs before to enlighten me on this! :)

The next paper, Maths. Hmm.... somehow I dislike it.

Reason? We weren't allowed to use calculator in the exam.

Casio fx-570MS scientific calculator.


Maths is not my best subject (though I somewhat had interest in it), but given that I've been solving Maths problem with a calculator since 2003, I find it hard to start off again without using it.

I couldn't really understand why the Japanese would not allow us to use calculator in the exam. Given that we've a tool to make things much easier and convenient, and able to achieve towards a higher level of understanding, why they would still rather stick with playing with the brain only?

As much as most people thought that Japan is a high-tech society, there are still many things that they would still stick with the traditional, manual way.
Examples:
- Limited shoplets that accept credit card transaction;
- Relying faxes & snail mail instead of e-mails;
- Using gas-based water heater instead of electric-based;
- Some still prefers VHS/cassette (magnetic tape) instead of DVD/CD (optical disc) media.
- Prefer pencil to pen even in university level.... etc.

Although I know the Japanese took pride in maintaining the traditions, but some I find it kinda ridiculous to still maintaining it until today, it should have been replaced by something much more convenient many moons ago!

That's the reality I'm gonna face. This is my future so I would just bear with it. Who knows, as time goes by I might be assimilated into such culture as well.

Hah seems that my argument has somewhat dislodged from the original topic regarding the exams. I would probably know the results for General Subjects & Maths by next week.

To end this post, here's a pic of Sumida river, not so far away from my place.


There must be still some interesting places around my area which I've yet to discovered it. Gonna hunt 'em down one by one from time to time eh....

'til then.