As students across the cohort prepare for their Prelim MCQ papers, we interviewed a student who seems to have figured it all out. Despite achieving lacklustre results ever since he began his education here, he managed to score full marks for every MCQ question across all his subjects in CT2. This has had a thoroughly uplifting effect on his grades and self-esteem.

His tutors admitted he has an adequate grasp of most concepts, but struggled to explain his poor performance prior to CT2. According to him, the syllabus isn’t overly difficult per se, but the way questions are set has consistently made passing difficult.

This is not particularly surprising given that the continued trend of predatory exam-setting and the ongoing grades arms race has led to very “interesting” question-setting. The Student Extermination & Assassination Bureau (SEAB) explained that this was a key strategy in combating the increasing threat of “students studying” as it made life immensely difficult for even the best prepared students. The sadistic MCQ-setting therefore heavily relies on trapping techniques used by world renowned guerilla warriors.

His hard work appears to have finally paid off, with the soon-to-be-patented brainwave arriving as he shaded “C” for the 1437th time. Given that his ability to get exactly zero or even negative scores on any MCQ paper had been legendary, he realised all he had to do was to conduct a population inversion, and pick the answer he knew to be most incorrect. Despite being limited by the 30 questions in the paper, this student shaded an option for all available answers on the Only Mindless Shading (OMS) sheet, accumulating bonus marks with his mind-blowing creativity.

Now this might appear counterintuitive at first, not least because it is the definition of counterintuitive, but it appears to have been very successful. Employing this strategy, the student managed to secure a perfect score on his MCQ and awe his classmates. It is also rumoured that the OMS machine grading his script stopped operation due to what has been described as an “integer overflow”. This is likely because the grading program was never designed to allocate more than 50% of the marks.

This then raises the important question, are exam papers any good at judging how good students are? A spokesperson from the SEAB put the Bureau’s stance succinctly, “of course not, we set papers to kill students”.

Given this information, the student’s approach appears sensible. But of course, it is only a matter of time before the SEAB grows wise to these tactics, forcing students to find some other workaround. Based on hearsay from the grapevine, the bureaucracy is planning to and may already have set questions without correct answers to further bamboozle candidates.  The one thing we can rest assured will remain constant, is that SEAB will manufacture the weapons locally, but export the blame to Cambridge.