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Zero or Perfect score, choose one

The university entrance exam

It was brutal in my country. You take the exam after finishing high school. If you can’t get a high score or don’t pass the first time, it’s considered socially that your future will be challenging.

The government made a dramatic change to the exam in 2014. It was a chaotic year, but 2015 was more relaxed. In 2015, students took an easier exam. While it wasn’t perfect, it was significantly better than before.

I took my university exam in 2013.

The A group of subjects

Think of A group subjects as foundational subjects for the STEM field. There are mathematics, physics, and chemistry in the group. Each subject exam can give you a maximum score of 10. The closer to 30 your total score gets, the better university you can join. Depending on the major, you might need between 24 and 28 credits for an economic study.

People interested in studying medicine or becoming doctors focus on the B group of subjects instead. Switching biology for physics in the A group would result in the B group.

In 2013, computer studies began to gain popularity. The entry score for top universities in the country for computer science and engineering was just 22. In 2012, it was 18.

At the time, I hadn’t decided on which major to study. My goal was to achieve the highest possible score to maximize my freedom of choice. This is also a common strategy of middle-class parents.

The training regimen

I knew I didn’t want to study in medical school, so my goal was to score around 26. At the time, it was well-known that the chance of getting a 26 without cram school and specialized teachers was very slim.

Hence, I started my ‘training regimen’ two years before the entrance exam, which included regular class attendance in the morning and afternoon, as well as evening cram school.

The cram school

I only realize later in life that the cram school tuition cost was really high compared to middle-class income. My parents paid for my studying regardless, and I do feel like I haven’t wasted it. And I believe that without it I would never have gotten a score of 26, and it also taught me valuable lessons that shaped the person I am today.

My sentiment is not common, though. If you ask a Vietnamese who has been through similar training regimen (most of the people in my generation have), they will tell you that the regimen is wasteful and most of its knowledge is discarded or has no impact on their life.

I understand why people think this way, and part of me does too. I also don’t care about specific knowledge I learned during cram school; some of it I relearn later to develop my career. What stuck with me is the mindset that my cram school teacher instilled in me.

The cram school teacher

Prof. Q was a mathematics professor at a prestigious university in northern Vietnam. Unfortunately, I can’t find him now using Google search. At the time I studied, he had many students.

Most of the time, he was a serious teacher. But he could be absolutely comic at times, as often seen in very well-spoken teachers.

He has a small statue. He seems old but is actually quite young, leading people to be surprised when they learn his age. I don’t know exactly how old he is, but it doesn’t matter for the story.

The mock exam

Professor Q finished teaching us the entire three-year high school curriculum at the end of my second year of high school. The last year, he focused solely on training us to apply what we learned and working on our skills solving old entrance-exam problems.

After he had taught us all the possible kinds of problems that might appear in the actual exam, it was time for his personal mock exam.

Before the mock exam training period, Professor Q announced that any student aiming for a mathematics score higher than 8 would fail if they couldn’t score perfectly on the mock exam.

And his mock exam? You either get a perfect score—or nothing at all. He laid out a few rules on how he graded our solutions:

  • The mock exam will have a total of five problems, compared to six in the actual entrance exam. The sixth problem in the actual exam is the hardest, reserved for students aiming for a perfect score of 10. He will teach how to solve this problem separately after the mock exam period.

  • In the five problems, if you get one wrong, you get a score of zero.

  • If you answer all five questions correctly, but he somehow realizes that you needed multiple attempts at one question (whether you redid it or crossed out some lines), you receive no points.

  • The time pressure is so high that you probably only have enough time for a single attempt at each of the five problems.

  • The only way to get a perfect score (with no scores in between) is by solving all five problems correctly in a single try.

His reasons are:

  • We’ll face a lot of pressure during the actual exam. If we don’t have the necessary skills which have become our second nature, it might be very difficult for us to score well.

  • In the actual exam, we would have about 30 minutes per problem—6 problems total, which amounts to 180 minutes. Unfortunately, 30 minutes may not be sufficient for a second attempt at a problem.

  • A second attempt at solving a problem increases our likelihood of making a mistake that could cost us points.

All the students, including me, were skeptical at first, we didn’t think that this feat can be possible. Prof. Q didn’t let us back down from the training though and as usual, we complied with his method.

It was incredibly challenging at first. I scored zero on half of my mock exams initially, but it improved over time with additional practice. Eventually, I managed to achieve a perfect score.

Most of us couldn’t do it. Prof. Q didn’t comment on how well we did overall. He gave out mock exams, graded us, and moved on. Now I think he knew the reality: some of us could do it, while others would not be able to. That was normal.

At first, I thought the feat was impossible with the number of mathematics problem variations in the five questions of the mock exam. But reality told me otherwise—that exact impossible feat is what was required to achieve a score of 9 on the actual math exam.

If it were not for Prof. Q training, I would probably decided not to look at the reality directly and instead relied on chance.

One of the things I realized later was that, for Prof. Q, he had always demonstrated that a skill can be mastered to the point of perfection through consistent practice. Every time he helped us solve a problem on the blackboard, he rarely made a mistake. We were always fascinated by it.

The lesson

The entrance exam, which may be unreasonable and relies heavily on rote memorization of mathematics problem variations, and Prof. Q still managed to teach me a valuable mindset of:

  • See the reality as it is. See what it takes to achieve something and act on it instead of relying on chance.

  • Seeing that limitation as an illusion, one realizes that if someone has accomplished a feat, there must be a path to achieving it.

  • Perfection isn’t a curse or a pipe dream; it’s the result of consistent practice and learning.

I have applied this mindset extensively throughout my programming career:

  • Codes that run the first time are very real and not just myths. With extensive and deep mastery of the programming language, debugging, and technologies, you can significantly improve your chances of performing this task or shorten the time of debugging to first successful execution dramatically.

  • There might not always be a one-size-fits-all solution for every problem, but for smaller scopes of issues, the perfect solution exists. You just need to dig deep enough.

  • Redoing a problem over and over again (often seen in CRUD problems of web development) is not necessarily a wasteful activity as long as you can still actively learn from each iteration. The process helps build programming into your intuition and develops your ability to notice the perfect solution.

  • etc.

Stay open-minded—you’ll learn a lot. See you next time.