The Administrative Aptitude Test, abbreviated as the AAT.
It was a standardized examination specifically designed to assess a series of psychological aptitudes related to success in administrative careers. It differed from ordinary intelligence tests, as well as tests of general knowledge or specific professional skills. By testing a range of psychological aptitudes, it predicted a candidate's likelihood of succeeding in various positions within the administrative field. What it tested was the ability a person had developed through years of accumulated life, study, and practical experience; essentially, it was an examination of fundamental latent abilities.
It was closed-book, with roughly 135 multiple-choice questions.
The exam ran from 9:00 to 11:00 in the morning, for two hours.
In Examination Room 026, after the proctor finished reading out the rules and precautions, the exam began. In the nearly frozen air, papers, answer sheets, and scratch paper were handed out to every candidate with a rustle. Dong Xuebin touched the stark white test paper, his heart rising into his throat. Keep it simple. It has to be simple.
Lowering his head and picking up his pen, he began answering.
The first question—huh, there had been a similar one in a Civil Servants exam prep book he had bought at Xidan Book Building. Easy.
The second question—uh, there seemed to have been something similar on Jiangnan Province's second Civil Servants exam three years ago. Also easy.
For the third question, he pondered for ten seconds before decisively choosing C. It was no different—easy.
For the fourth question, he tapped his pen tip against the scratch paper and eventually chose B. Though he wasn't entirely certain, he was probably close enough.
Getting through four questions in a row so smoothly put Dong Xuebin in an excellent mood. He thought this exam really wasn't all that difficult. He wrote and answered, but before he could celebrate for long, the difficulty shot up sharply starting from question six. From questions six through ten, Dong Xuebin didn't know a single answer and could only guess blindly. From questions thirty-three through forty-seven, he was also half-guessing, with no confidence whatsoever.
That was undoubtedly a dangerous sign.
The further he went, the heavier Dong Xuebin's heart became. It sank with a thud.
It was simply too difficult. It seemed even a little more complicated than last year's National Civil Service Exam.
The quantitative relations questions were manageable. Dong Xuebin had only recently graduated from university, so he hadn't forgotten much of his knowledge. He calculated his way through nearly all of them, and his accuracy should have been quite high. The verbal comprehension and expression questions were about the same; after thinking them over and turning them around in his mind, he figured he could get most of them right. But the logical reasoning and general knowledge questions were far too difficult this time. There were dozens of them, and he would be lucky to get even half right. Most notably, as for the data analysis questions, he estimated he couldn't answer a single one correctly.
It's over. I'm screwed.
Dong Xuebin's head felt like it had swollen to twice its size. He wanted nothing more than to curse out the test setter.
Twenty minutes passed.
Forty minutes passed.
With fifteen minutes left before the end of the exam, quite a few people in Dong Xuebin's room had already put down their pens. Some stared blankly at the ceiling in confusion. Some grabbed their hair and gritted their teeth in frustration. Some covered their faces silently in despair. Most wore pained, irritated expressions. It seemed that hardly any of them were satisfied with their papers.
Dong Xuebin felt he couldn't wait any longer. Otherwise, this Administrative Aptitude Test alone would make him fail alongside most of the others.
He gathered himself, pulled out a 2B pencil, and began scribbling on the answer sheet. He marked the questions he wasn't sure of or couldn't answer with several obvious signs. Counting them up, there were around forty or fifty questions. As for the other eighty-odd multiple-choice questions, he was more than seventy percent confident he had answered them correctly.
"Hm? What are you drawing?" A balding middle-aged proctor walked toward Dong Xuebin.
Dong Xuebin glanced at the clock and took a deep breath. Hah. Let's begin.
Seeing the mess he had made of the answer sheet, the proctor frowned. "Don't randomly draw boxes on the answer sheet. How is the machine supposed to read it if you write like that? Erase it, now."
Dong Xuebin didn't answer. Instead, he sprang from his chair. Under the stunned gazes of every candidate and proctor, he grabbed his answer sheet in his left hand, charged forward, shoved aside the balding proctor, and rushed out of the classroom.
"What the hell is he doing?"
"Who knows? Has he gone crazy?"
"Stop! Stop right there! It's not time to hand in your paper yet!"
Everyone was dumbfounded. They couldn't understand why this guy had suddenly run out of the examination room. Did he know he wouldn't pass and decide to give up?
One proctor from Room 026 stayed behind to maintain order, while the other hurriedly chased after him, shouting through the corridor, "Don't run! Lao Li, Lao Zhang, grab that kid! He's still holding his answer sheet! Don't let him disrupt the other candidates! Hurry!"
The two proctors wandering the hallway had never encountered such a situation before and were both rather stunned.
As they spoke, Dong Xuebin had already charged headfirst into the third classroom next door. He kicked the door open, and seeing the stunned crowd staring with wide eyes and open mouths, he didn't say a word. He kicked aside another desk and ran straight to Xiao Dong by the shortest route. Before Xiao Dong could react, Dong Xuebin snatched his answer sheet away in one swift motion.
Xiao Dong stared stupidly at him. "What the hell are you doing?" Even if he were beaten to death, he never would have imagined Dong Xuebin would come to cheat so openly.
Dong Xuebin said, "I told you before the exam to watch your paper."
The proctors in this room were both young women. Seeing Dong Xuebin kick open the door and snatch a test paper as soon as he entered, neither of them actually dared step forward to stop him. They could only stand there in shock and shout, "Which examination room are you from? What are you doing? Put that paper down!"
Only then did Xiao Dong snap out of it. Furious, he rushed over and tried to snatch it back. "Give it back!"
Dong Xuebin wasn't particularly athletic, but he was still a little stronger than Xiao Dong. He twisted aside, then bolted out of the classroom. Three staff members were charging toward him from the other end of the corridor. Dong Xuebin halted, kicked off, and jumped through an open glass window on the first-floor corridor into the flower beds. As he ran toward an empty part of the field, he lowered his head and compared his own answer sheet with Xiao Dong's, desperately memorizing the answers to the questions he had marked.
ABBCADDDBCDADAB...
Running out of the classroom and snatching the paper had cost him nearly half a minute. He had thirty seconds left.
I can make it.
"Come back!"
"Stop right there!"
Several staff members and security guards closed in on him from both front and back.
Dong Xuebin ignored them and continued reciting the answers in order. "ACCABBDDDCAD..."
"Grab him!"
Suddenly, a heavy weight slammed into his back, and Dong Xuebin was tackled to the ground.
A proctor behind him said bitterly, "What kind of person is this? Disqualify him from the exam!"
Another panted heavily. "This is far too serious. Call the police!"
"My score is still valid, right?" Xiao Dong, who had chased after them, asked anxiously. "He was the one who stole my answer sheet!"
Lying on the ground, Dong Xuebin endured the pain and finished reading the final row of answers. Then he shouted, "Back!"
The surroundings fell completely silent.
Inside Examination Room 026, everyone kept their heads down and answered their questions. Not a single person spoke.
Gel pens and 2B pencils rustled across the test papers, while a tense atmosphere filled the air.
Dong Xuebin's head swayed groggily. The next moment, he saw the balding proctor standing before him, frowning at his answer sheet. "Don't randomly draw boxes on the answer sheet. How is the machine supposed to read it if you write like that? Erase it, now."
Time had reversed.
Still shaken, Dong Xuebin wiped away his sweat. "Yes."
The proctor gave him a look, then turned and walked away.
Immediately afterward, Dong Xuebin didn't dare waste any time. He quickly used his pencil to fill in the answers. Don't forget. Don't forget.
ABBCADDDBCDADAB...
His memory training from the past week hadn't been for nothing. Dong Xuebin had specially prepared for this exam cheating attempt. His pencil flew across the paper. The first twenty choices weren't particularly difficult; with short-term memory alone, most people could remember over twenty letters. But the later ones were a little more difficult. Dong Xuebin exerted every ounce of effort before finally reproducing more than thirty letters, the limit of his memory. As for the dozen or so after that, he had known while memorizing them that he couldn't remember them clearly, so he made some compromises.
For example, he remembered AACBA as AAAAA.
For example, he remembered ABAD as ABCD.
Two minutes later, Dong Xuebin had reproduced every one of the dozens of answers he had copied from Xiao Dong.
If Xiao Dong had gotten nearly full marks on last year's National Civil Service Exam's Administrative Aptitude Test, then this year's AAT shouldn't be much worse, right? At the very least, his accuracy had to be around ninety percent. That would be enough. Added to the questions Dong Xuebin himself was confident about, his AAT score would definitely be very high.
Hah.
Cheating... successful!!!
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