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Kenyan children, most of them future voters, will sit for their final year exams in the next few days.
While their future pay slips might not be determined by their current result slips, examinations are the only linear ways of determining who will be the managing director, the account executive, the tea and tyre boys.
In sitting exams, there are characters who emerge before, during and after giving out the answer sheets to the invigilator or examiner. There are those who look like they have been bewitched while others could as well be watching God’s Must be Crazy.
Have you watched the British psychological film, The Exam?
Well, here are 10 students you will encounter during exams be it in primary, secondary or at the university.
1. The Pastor
He or she will be praying for the exams before the teacher asks them to. They are mostly members of the Christian Union and they pray for the exam alongside Presidential elections, drought, famine, road accidents and financial difficulties.
Never mind exams depend on whether you know the answers or not. And Angel Gabriel hardly visited any candidates to fan their heads for answers to questions that they never revised!
2. The Confused
This one hears some topics for the first time on exam day and frantically tries cramming notes never seen before just when the examiner is instructing that all books be removed from the tables…
3. The Night Runner
Crams in the dead of night, feet inside bucket full of water and coffee mug at hand. They never stand noise and just before exam time sneak to the nearby shrubbery for last minute flipping of condensed notes.
4. The Nut Head
Always gets the bladder full at this time of year, rushing to the toilet every five minutes with a look of someone about to be executed by a firing squad.
5. The Mwakenya Brigade
This one hears some topics from the class brain box and shortly learns that they had been revising for the wrong exam.
Undaunted, these, mostly Mwakenya Brigade, normally have all the condensed answers for all subjects and quickly resorts to the most ingenuous dubbing methods imaginable.
6. The Shaker
This breed, not matter how prepared, start shaking uncontrollably. You would think they contracted instant malaria at the sight of those green exam booklets. They can’t write straight and began stammering, hearts beating out their chests.
7. The Brain box
Normally, the classmate’s teachers call ‘National School Material’ but who ensures you don’t dub his answers and thus hides his answer sheet with his entire upper body with one eye darting to see whether anyone is snooping for answers.
8. The Sumbua
Has no enough ball pens, the pencil has no rubber and the ruler drops from the second floor and has to keep on stealing yours.
Sumbua could also be that overconfident classmate who suguas ngoto on heads that are trying to understand ‘Karl Popper’s Theory of Falsification.’
9. The FBI
These ones see wrong exam questions long after you answered them and felt very good about finding the answer. The examiner agrees there is a problem and issues a correction, but hawk eye later, asks for more answer sheet papers…yet you have acres of space for rough work!
10. The Hurry Harry or Harriet
You all have done exams next to those students who are always the first to finish one hour before time.
They later start discussing questions to do with Plato, yet your answers, in full pages, were dedicated to Pluto!
