Quiz (3K)

"How did the weekend go by so fast?!"

"I haven't even had any fun yet."

"I barely got to play my new game, and now it's time for class again."

A new week began. The little groups in the classroom had settled into their routines, and everyone was chatting with one another, sharing the joys of their weekend.

The back-left corner was as quiet as ever.

You En was doing his best to sleep, Horikita Suzune was still doing her best to push herself, and Ayanokoji Kiyotaka was doing his best to stay unnoticed. Everyone had something to keep them busy.

Chabashira-sensei walked in carrying two bags of exam papers.

"We have a test this morning."

The class erupted into a commotion.

"What?"

"How could this happen... I don't want to take a test!"

"Chabashira, could you give us a little more time?"

Faced with the class's uproar,

Chabashira Sae said flatly,

"You've got to test yourselves after studying. Exams are actually a benefit to you, so don't be ungrateful."

When the exam papers reached You En, he finally sat up from his desk and thanked Matsushita Chiaki, who had passed them back.

You En took a look. It was a comprehensive exam, with all the subjects they'd studied that week divided into roughly two sections and tested on a single paper.

He finished in less than half an hour and gave it a quick check before going back to sleep.

It wasn't as if he could do anything else, and he was bored. There was nowhere good to sleep if he handed in his paper early and left, so he figured he might as well sleep in the exam room.

He didn't know how long he'd been asleep when a woman's voice called out,

"Wake up, You En. Hand in your paper."

You En looked up. It was Matsushita—fifty-fifty. No, it was Matsushita Chiaki.

"Oh, here. Sorry for the trouble."

Matsushita Chiaki took the paper and glanced at it. She'd expected most of it to be blank, but it was almost completely filled in. She checked the first few questions and saw that his answers matched hers. They were all correct.

Huh? No way.

She glanced at a few more as she passed the paper forward and saw that those were correct too. There was one question where their answers differed, and it wasn't because she'd deliberately written the wrong answer... The answer Matsushita thought was correct was wrong too.

Could he... have gotten a perfect score?

The exam tested a high level of overall mastery. It wasn't designed to be hard or full of trick questions; it accurately reflected how well each student had grasped what they'd studied during that period.

The morning's exam scores came out at noon, along with the class and year rankings.

"First: You En, overall score 200."

"Second: Horikita, overall score 185."

"Third: Rokusuke Koenji, overall score 180."

"Fourth: Wang Meiyu, overall score 140."

"Fifth: Hirata Yosuke, overall score 120."

"..."

Chabashira Sae read out the scores, then stopped after the tenth name and put a cigarette in her mouth.

"The class average is 72. I don't know how you managed to drag it so low. Even if someone got zero, one person could still bring the average up to a hundred... Forget it. I can't be bothered to lecture you."

With that, she pushed open the door and left.

After a few seconds, once they were sure Chabashira Sae had gone far enough away,

Kei Karuizawa was the first to complain.

"Honestly, she's so rude. It's just a routine quiz. Was that really necessary?"

The girls around her chimed in. "Exactly. It was only a little quiz."

The biggest group among the boys was the Three Idiots Group.

Yamauchi Haruki had already forgotten the pain of his past mistakes. He turned around, saw Ken Sudō's score, and smirked smugly.

"What? You only got 14 points? I got 42. That's more than double your score."

Ken Sudō glared at him and suddenly stood up, making Yamauchi jump.

"What are you doing now? Your bad grades are your own problem. Don't be jealous of me!"

Since Ken Sudō considered him a classmate, he held back, only pounding the desk in anger.

"What's the point of studying?! You're all bookworms. I'm going to play basketball."

The noise in the classroom woke You En, and he sat up.

Seeing that he was awake, Horikita Suzune's voice came from behind him.

"Didn't you sleep well last night?"

You En replied, "I studied until after four and got less than two hours of sleep."

Matsushita Chiaki, who'd been listening from the desk ahead, froze.

Dude, how are you this intense?

"Now that I've slept, I can keep studying!"

You En took out a book he'd borrowed from the library and continued reading. He had nothing else to do, and he was in such good shape that he might as well study.

After acquiring a lot of skills, You En had realized that different skills varied in how hard they were to learn. With something like Knots, a little practice was enough to reach mastery. For many other skills, though, going from beginner to expert still required practical experience.

You En thought the person who'd invented this panel was a genius.

Even if this school was just as it seemed, with no dangers to worry about, he still thought it was pretty good.

Wasn't a good school one where you could learn things that were genuinely useful?

Horikita Suzune tapped You En, and he turned to look at her.

"How did you solve this? Let me see your paper."

"Oh."

You En handed her the paper.

"Why is it so messy?"

Horikita Suzune tried to smooth out the creased paper.

"Exam papers are only useful during the exam, aren't they? I was planning to throw it away."

Horikita Suzune had been about to say something, but after seeing the scores on the two papers, she said helplessly,

"All right, you've earned the right to say that."

You En turned back around. It had nothing to do with the score; that was just how the test-taking system worked. An exam itself didn't explain much, nor could it show what a person was really like. At most, it reflected their attitude toward their studies during that period.

Horikita Suzune looked over his paper. She'd expected his work to be more casual and messy, but it was neat and clean.

She looked for the question she hadn't gotten full marks on and saw that he'd written down three different ways to solve it in the answer section. She instantly lost her composure.

Maybe he'd finished the exam and was so bored that he'd just written a few more things down.

Horikita Suzune recognized the gap between them. Although their personal panels both rated their Test-Taking skill as expert, expertise and experience still came in different degrees.

In fact, over the weekend, You En had helped her look over her notes. He'd found a few problems and helped fill in some of the gaps.

He'd even given her some questions to practice, and a few were exactly the same types as questions on the exam.

Horikita Suzune took a deep breath, tamped down her emotions, and gradually calmed herself.

If she'd done it by herself, her overall score would probably have been around 160 to 180. Unless she'd performed exceptionally well, she likely wouldn't have reached her current score.

She extended a finger and poked You En. He didn't respond, so she drew a little circle on his clothes.

You En felt her tickle his back. "Oh, you've finished looking at the paper. Could you throw it away for me?"

"Throw it away?"

Horikita Suzune thought that would be a shame. The paper, and the school's education system, could both be called works of art: one was the art of the process, and the other was the beauty of the result.

"Then I'll keep it for you."

"Sure."

You En looked up and saw a girl standing in front of his desk. It was Wang Meiyu, a classmate he felt a special kinship with.

When people from the same hometown met, there was always a certain feeling between them. Whether that meant stabbing each other in the back or getting misty-eyed depended on the people involved.

"Um..."

Wang Meiyu asked politely,

"You En, could I borrow your exam paper to look at?"

You En nodded, then realized the paper wasn't with him anymore. He pointed behind himself.

"She has it. You can ask her... Actually, I'll get it for you."

He figured that asking Wang Meiyu to ask Horikita Suzune for his paper... well, even if she got it, the process would be a trial.

"Suzune, could you give me the paper?"

"Oh."

Her voice sounded emotionless as she handed it over.

Wang Meiyu felt bad and hurriedly bowed to thank them. "I'll return it soon."

"Take your time. I won't need it anyway."

After the interruption, You En didn't feel like reading his textbook for the time being. He looked around the class and began what was supposedly called observing human behavior.

Most of Kei Karuizawa's group were complaining about the teacher, the exam, and the school environment. But they were really just venting their feelings and finding a sense of camaraderie in one another.

The Three Idiots Group probably couldn't be called that anymore. Ken Sudō had more or less left the group, but another idiot had joined, so there were still three of them. No need to change the name.

Kanji Ike sighed. "I did really badly this time."

Yamauchi Haruki spoke up.

"How about we go out together?"

Sotoyama Hideo didn't understand where that suggestion had come from.

"What?"

Yamauchi Haruki explained, "You know... We're in such a bad mood that we can't study properly. We might as well go relax first and then come back to it."

"Besides... we could talk to the girls. Just so you know, Kushida's my target! You can't steal her from me."

You En shook his head. He knew this guy would never change.

The first half of the excuse was actually pretty good.

In his previous life, his high school class monitor had invited him out to get something to eat after she'd done badly on a midterm, trying to turn her sorrow into an appetite.

She'd usually ranked in the top ten in their year, so she'd been upset when she'd slipped to the thirties that time.

After she adjusted to the result, she stayed in the top five. In the end, although she hadn't performed particularly well on the college entrance exam either, she still got into Jiao Tong University.

People sometimes had an excess of emotion when something happened, and they needed an outlet. That was perfectly normal.

But you couldn't spend all your time venting. One mark of maturity was being able to control your emotions—not by never changing, but by actively keeping them within bounds.

You En glanced at Hirata. He was looking at his exam paper, probably reviewing his mistakes, but various classmates kept interrupting him. Kei Karuizawa was the worst of them, though he hadn't yet realized how serious the problem was.

Based on what Chabashira-sensei had told him earlier,

personal points were tied to individual performance, while class points were tied to the class as a whole.

You En guessed that personal points were only awarded to students who met a passing score, like the minimum taxable income threshold. There was probably a cutoff score for receiving personal points, and that score was based on each student's individual performance.

But what were class points for? They'd only received personal points at the start of the term, and class points hadn't been mentioned since. Did they still determine the class rankings, as in the original story?

You En didn't think it was that simple. Personal points were already so important, affecting every aspect of their lives and directly concerning each individual.

So with some kind of evaluation criteria in place,

and class points not being awarded until next month,

could they really be of little use?