Which is the worst exam in your life to mess up?

Hi there. Sorry I had not been posting - my sister has been in town recently and that coincided with a particularly busy period at work, so I had been either spending quality time with my wonderful sister or desperately trying to catch up with work. There was so much due diligence stuff I had to handle for a new client and it was incredibly tedious! But today's post is thanks to my reader 'LR Singapore' who posted a hypothetical question - he rambled a bit so I shall summarize the question: as a gatekeeper, whom would I view more favorably? Candidate A (let's call him Andy) messed up his A levels, ended up in a private university (let's say he went to SIM) and he then goes on to get a first class with honours from this private university. Candidate B (let's call her Brenda) aced her A levels, went to Oxford University where she studied with the very best students in the world but unfortunately, Brenda really struggled there and in the end, she barely scraped through her finals with a pass grade and got the equivalent of a third class. So hypothetically speaking, if I am recruiting for a graduate entry level position and I am presented with a Andy vs Brenda situation - as the gatekeeper, which candidate would I look upon more favorably then and which candidate would I judge more harshly and reject first?

Even intelligent students can mess up an exam from time to time.

Firstly, let me clarify that neither candidates have done well in their studies because it is clear that they have both messed up at some point but they have messed up at different points. Andy messed up during his A levels whilst Brenda messed up during her university years. I suppose the question is which mistake is more costly: Andy's or Brenda's? I am inclined to say that Andy's mistake is more costly as I am probably going to be a bit more forgiving with Brenda. Since I am a gymnast, allow me to use a sports analogy to compare the two situations. Imagine that Andy is a gymnast who messed up a competition at the age of 17 - this was the selection to the national team and because Andy didn't train hard enough, he failed to make the national team. Instead, he chooses to continue competing on a local level and actually does rather well in a state competition at the age of 21, where he is competing with all the other gymnasts within his state. Brenda on the other hand, excelled at the same competition that Andy failed at and Brenda gets selected for the national team. For three years, she works extremely hard and then goes to the Olympics - at the Olympics, despite having some of the most difficult routines in the competition, she gets nervous and makes some mistakes (see the video below). Her performance is extremely disappointing and she doesn't even come close to winning a medal; all she could do is claim "hey I represented my country at the Olympics" but we all know her performance at the Olympics was quite poor and it had proven to be very disappointing for Brenda - especially after how hard she had trained for the Olympics.

I'm sorry if that sounded harsh but I do see it in this light: your A level syllabus and exams are easier than whatever you are going to study at university level - this is especially so if you make it to one of the world's top universities like Oxford. So if you were to go back to the Youtube video with all the gymnasts falling above, are they terrible gymnasts? Hell no, they're all excellent gymnasts who were good enough to make it to the Olympics, except that during the competition, they made some mistakes - but regardless, anyone who knows the sport well will be able to tell the difference between an excellent gymnast who makes a mistake whilst attempting an extremely difficult skill and a gymnast who is just not that good in the first place. Heck, featured in that video was American gymnast Nastia Liukin who was a world and Olympic champion in the sport - she dominated the sport in the years when she competed internationally from 2003 right up till her retirement in 2008, after the Beijing Olympics where she won 1 gold, 3 silvers and 1 bronze medal. Yet even when you see a video of someone like Nastia Liukin making a mistake, you would never assume that she was a clumsy idiot who has no talent at all for gymnastics - even Olympic gold medalists can make mistakes sometimes and we're willing to look at everything else they have done to judge just how good they are. That's why I would be a lot more forgiving to someone like Brenda - she's like the brilliant gymnast who trained so hard to make it to the Olympics only to fall when it was her turn to compete. Whereas someone like Andy never even had the chance to prove himself - he failed earlier on during his A levels, thus he ended up in a system which was a lot easier, where he didn't have to compete with particularly smart students. Hey let's face it, if you had straight As, would you ever choose Andy's route? Never, no way.

Sadly for Andy, he messed up an easier exam - the A levels; whilst Brenda messed her up finals at Oxford university. It is pretty obvious that the exam that Brenda failed is the much harder exam and the exams in Oxford are notoriously difficult because they are already receiving the very best students from all over the world there - so they need to separate the true geniuses from those who are just quite clever. By the same token, if you were to conduct an experiment whereby you make a bunch of students from a private university like SIM  sit for an Oxford university exam and send the scripts to be marked in Oxford with the specific instructions, "please mark and grades these papers as you would a student from Oxford regardless". The results are predictable: if you were to subject a bunch of private university students to that kind of standard, then practically every single student will get an F grade and fail everything. Quite simply, smart students who achieve good results will naturally choose to go to a good university, leaving the ones with poor results no alternative but to go to a private university like SIM as there's just no way they can gain admission into Oxford, Cambridge or even NUS with bad A level results. So even if for some bizarre reason, SIM decides one year to make their exams just as hard as Oxford's and subject their students to the same standards - even if it means failing a lot of their students, guess what? That would be a moot point, an interesting experiment at best because the public perception of most people is that only students who have really messed up their A levels end up in private universities and a certain GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) principle applies here: you can't make shit shine, even if you were to subject them to the same programme.

Not all degrees at equal - didn't you get the memo?

So allow me to talk about another case study I know who has a story that is similar to Andy's - let's call him Candidate C, or Chris and interestingly enough, this is a true story even if we are going back quite a few years to the 1990s. Chris messed up his O levels really badly because of an illness during the exam period. I remember reading that he was burning up with fever during some of the exams and he could barely stand up, never mind focus on the exam. His poor grades managed to scrape him into a neighbourhood JC where he decided to make the most of it (rather than try to repeat his O levels, once he had recovered from his illness). He worked extremely hard and achieved stunningly good results at the A levels, gaining admission into Cambridge university - the first from his JC to have ever accomplished that feat. He went on to do well at university and is an extremely successful businessman today. Yeah this is a true story - as you can imagine, a story like that was very interesting to the local press in Singapore because they love stories like that. It is really no big deal if a student from a top JC scores straight As, gets a scholarship to go to Harvard, Cambridge or Oxford - that happens all the time but when someone from a neighbourhood JC accomplishes that same feat, he is celebrated as some kind of role model and hero who will inspire all the other students in neighbourhood schools. The message had been, "hey if Chris can do this, so can you - don't give up on yourself just because you're in a neighbourhood school, you too can go to Oxford or Cambridge and become so successful if you work as hard as Chris!"

So let's compare the situation between Andy and Chris. They both messed up an exam but at different times: Andy messed up his A levels and Chris messed up his O levels - the reason as to why things went wrong for them is irrelevant to the situation, unfortunately all that matters is the results that they have to deal with. Why was Chris in a much better position than Andy then? The reason is pretty simple: all three candidates sat for the same A level exams, well - even if they didn't take the exact same subjects or took their exams in the same year, they were at least graded by the very same system so it is more or less a level playing field for them to compete against each other fairly. However, Andy took his university level exams at SIM whilst Brenda did her exams at Oxford and Chris did his exams at Cambridge. It is pretty obvious that this is not a level playing field: Andy took a much, much easier exam than either Brenda or Chris. If Andy wanted to prove that his bad results at his A levels was because of something like a bout of illness (as was in the case of Chris), then he needed to excel in an exam which was going to be as difficult or more difficult than the ones that Brenda and Chris took at their universities. So hypothetically, even if Andy was indeed very ill during his A levels exam and he is indeed a very intelligent person, he has failed to prove his intelligence at SIM because the syllabus, course content and exam are all perceived to be a lot easier than the equivalent that both Brenda and Chris had to contend with.

For the sake of the argument, let's imagine that both Andy and Chris are both equally intelligent and capable; they also both fell very sick during their vital exam period except that it happened to Andy during his A levels and to Chris during his O levels. So why is it Chris is treated a lot less harshly by the system whilst Andy seems to have been condemned by the system just because he went to a private university? The answer is simple: each major exam you take becomes more important than the previous major exam. So once you've taken your O levels or GSCEs, nobody cares what you did for your PSLE. Once you've done your A levels, nobody cares what you did for your O levels or GSCEs. Then once you've done your degree, your A level results become obsolete and unimportant. The fact is once you have taken your A levels, your academic path diverges greatly depending on the kind of further education you opt for and there is no longer any kind of level playing field. Chris had his disastrous exam results before the path diverged whilst Andy has his disaster just at the point it diverts. Hypothetically speaking, if Andy is indeed as intelligent and capable as Chris and had merely fallen ill during his exam period, then the sensible and rational thing to do would be to cut his losses and resit for his A levels - that way, he loses a year but hits the reset button at which point he wipes the slate clean and has the chance to get the results he needs to get into a great university like Harvard or Oxford. The only reason why Andy wouldn't do that is he genuinely feels that it would be totally pointless to resit his A levels if he has little or no chance or improving his grades - that would suggest that he thinks he is simply too stupid to get better grades no matter how many times he attempts the same exams. So that would tantamount of a self-admission of stupidity! Oh dear, wrong message.

There's a very good reason why Andy ought to have retaken his A levels if he was genuinely intelligent and was expecting straight As, but had suffered an untimely bout of illness. Degrees are expensive. Oh goodness me, on top of that they also take three years to complete. A degree from a private university like SIM is no cheaper than from a respectable Singaporean university like NUS. So why would you spend three years of your precious time and so much money on a degree that doesn't command respect when it would cost far less money to hit the reset button by taking just one year out to resit your A levels? Regardless, some people would suggest that someone in Andy's position could try to gain new respectability and credibility by going to go do a master's degree at a very respectable university but there is a problem with that theory. Firstly, there are far fewer places available in graduate school than at undergraduate level: remember, Andy is aiming to gain admission into a master's degree course at somewhere prestigious like Oxford or Cambridge. But there are just so few places available for these master's programmes at these top universities and competition for these places is extremely intense. I'm afraid our friend Andy is always going to be at the back of the queue behind people who have bachelor's degrees from better universities with much better reputations. That's the harsh reality: the best case scenario for Andy is to get a place in a master's programme is a mediocre university somewhere in the middle of the league table like Aberystwyth University (ranked 65th out of 131 universities in the UK) - no it is not as respected or prestigious as Oxford or Cambridge, but at least it is a step up from SIM. Nonetheless, getting a master's degree from a mediocre university simply sends the message that you're plain average and not good enough for one of those top tier universities: so would it be worth the time, energy, money and effort for a message about one's mediocrity?

Furthermore, there's yet another reason why this "master's degree at a good university redemption route" would not work in real life. Many of us do not need a master's degree to pursue the choice of our career and indeed, even for those who do have a master's degree, they would have probably worked a few years first to have a clear idea about their future career path. That would then allow them to select a master's programme that would be directly relevant and useful to their career. This however, would prove to be problematic for Andy because he needs to join the work force after graduation from SIM but he is competing with so many other graduates from better universities. He is at a massive disadvantage with a degree from a less reputable university which sends out all the wrong messages. There is the very real possibility that he would not get his ideal job and in the real world, he'll probably just settle for the first job that comes along which could be vastly different from what he had in mind originally. This would be one bad decision leading to another bad decision: it is a vicious cycle. Andy ends up working in a job he hates, it doesn't get him the work experience he needs for his ideal career and without any relevant work experience, he can't get into the master's programme of his choice at a good university. He is stuck is a cycle that he simply cannot get out of and he becomes frustrated, disappointed and depressed. This is mostly because he kicked the can down the road: when he messed up his A levels, he thought, it's okay I will fix it later with a master's degree from a good university even if I have a bachelor's degree from SIM. What he should have done instead was to simply say, I messed up real bad, that shouldn't have happened. I am going to fix it now by resitting for my A levels at the earliest opportunity, so I could put things right and get back on track.

Now here's my gripe with Andy. Many Singaporeans have a very simple academic path in mind: O levels, A levels, degree - then they will find a job. They don't know how to change their plans when things go wrong. For Andy, he went into complete denial when he even up in SIM and thought, "nah it's okay, I'll figure things out later." Let me share with you a story I have heard from a friend Ali who has climbed Mt Kilimanjaro - the tallest mountain in Africa. The journey to the summit involves several stages where you trek from one camp to the other - the camps offer basic facilities and a safe place to rest, refuel and spend the night, getting some much needed rest. About 50 minutes after Ali's team had set off from one of the camps and had begun the long trek to the next camp up the mountain, it started raining heavily. The path had become very muddy, it had become very windy, visibility was poor and everyone was soaked. Thus Ali's guide declared that it was unsafe for the team to move on and that the safest thing to do would be to backtrack to the previous camp, spending another night there. It would mean a day's delay but trekking up the mountain during a rainstorm like that was decidedly dangerous. The team were frustrated and disappointed, nonetheless they did as they were told because they trusted their guide. As they were returning to the camp, they passed another American team who were determined to press on in spite of the storm; Ali's guide pleaded with the Americans, "no it is not safe, the path has very muddy and slippery ahead. You cannot see much, you may get lost in the jungle if conditions don't improve." But the Americans simply ignored the guide, claiming that they were very experienced and had climbed in far worse conditions before. Furthermore, these Americans were on a schedule and they didn't want to be delayed a day so they decided to push on.

Ali's team were delayed a day but managed to make it to the top of the mountain safely and back - but they didn't see the Americans at all along the way which made Ali's team somewhat worried. As it turned out, the Americans had come across a part of the path that had been completely flooded in the storm. So rather than try to wade across the water, they decided to take a small detour into the jungle to avoid the flooded part and rejoin the path further up the mountain. Except of course, they ended up hopelessly lost in the jungle as the conditions deteriorated - they couldn't find their way back to the path. After every hours of wandering around hopelessly lost in the jungle, totally soaked in the rain, they were utterly exhausted. That was when they realized that they were really in trouble and there was just no way that they were going to make it to the submit with everyone in the team were in a rather bad state. Eventually, the Americans had to be rescued and evacuated to the nearest hospital - not only did they miss their flight, they also never made it to the summit. A pretty miserable result which could have been averted if they had followed the advice of Ali's guide. Well, that's a darn good analogy for Andy's situation - pushing on because you're just too stubborn to change your plans despite the fact that you were warned that your plan A is not going to work out. People like Andy end up paying a much higher price by refusing to consider alternatives to his plan A even when something unexpected goes wrong. Where does this inability to adapt come from then? I think it is the power of denial - refusing to accept that you're in a really dire, desperate situation.

So, what can Andy do then? Well there's plenty indeed! Let's go back to the drawing board here: what is Andy trying to prove? He is trying to prove that he is intelligent - now it is clear that both Brenda and Chris have managed to do that by gaining a place in Oxford and Cambridge. Is Andy going to achieve that by acing an exam at SIM? Hell no, no way. But hey, even if Andy didn't want to resit his A levels for whatever reason, there are still loads of other things he can do instead to make that very same point. How about setting up your own business? Or getting the job for a few years, there are jobs such as sales out there which will gladly take non-graduates - as long as you have the soft skills to relate to clients, you can sell and add value to the company. If his parents has the money to pay for a degree at a private university, why not instead spend that money on sending Andy abroad to get some training in some niche, specialist fields which would enable Andy to start a new career path. So for example, did you know that air traffic controllers are not required to have a degree? That's because what they do is so niche and specialist that they need very job-specific training in order to become an air traffic controller and even if say they had a degree in engineering, geography or physics, guess what? The degree is at best irrelevant, at worst totally useless. There are indeed many great career options for those who choose not to do a degree and let's not forget that even if you do get a good degree, you may end up like me. I am a former scholar with a good degree, I studied at two of the best universities in the UK and France but yet like so many graduates, I ended up doing a job which doesn't need a degree at all (I work in corporate finance today).

I know what you're going to say: if a graduate like you ends up pursuing a career that doesn't really relate to your degree at all, then there's no harm in someone like Andy doing a degree at SIM, right? Well, you're wrong. Firstly, there's the concept of opportunity cost you have to contend with: that's three years of Andy's precious time plus all the money his parents have spent at SIM. Ouch. That time and money could have been put to much better use on something far more useful than an SIM degree that's not even worth the paper it is printed on. Besides, there's a new generation of "too cool for university" entrepreneurs who are non-graduates. When I was at an event in Shenzhen last year, I met an 18 year old Australian guy called Scott who started his own company at the age of 16 and he is now at the stage where he can drop everything and go do a degree, or he could forget about university and focus on running his highly successful company that is getting a lot of interest from the investors in China. He asked me if he should get a degree and my answer was simple: what the hell would someone like you need a degree for? A degree is meant to help you get your first job but if you already are making good money as the boss of a company, then taking time out to get a degree is a completely illogical and downright stupid step. Thus it is better to try to pass yourself off as one of those bright young entrepreneurs like my brilliant Aussie friend Scott than to insist on getting a degree when the only university that will accept you is SIM.

A valid question one may ask at this stage is this: what if Aussie Scott's start up fails and he is back to square one, having to find a job like so many young people out there today? Then what? He doesn't even have a degree, how is he going to compete for the good jobs? Well then, Scott would have something a lot of graduates don't have - years of work experience and he has proven himself that he is able to function in the business world whilst those fresh graduates have proven no more that they are good at scoring As at exams and who knows just how well they will function when you place them in a real work environment like an office. Well, this reminds me of something my father (a retired teacher) said to me - my regular readers will know that I have spent time in Germany for work and once after yet another trip to Germany, I commented to my father than my German had improved a lot after working in Germany. He then said something to the effect of, "great, now you can get some qualifications in German, to prove that you're good at the German language." I tried to point out to my father that he is wrong - the whole point of getting paper qualifications in German is to prove to people that you are actually proficient in German, so you're able to thrive in a German-speaking world environment without using English. Well, I've already done that: I had worked in Germany, in a German-speaking work environment and my German employers and colleagues were satisfied that whilst my German isn't perfect, it is good enough and fit for purpose in a German work environment. The fact is that I am already getting good work in Germany should be enough proof that my German is of a decent standard - but my Singaporean father just doesn't get it.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

After all, I'm telling my father: I taught myself German, I don't need a teacher, I don't need to go take a course. Fuck teachers, not everyone needs a teacher, I can do it all myself without any help from a teacher - who needs teachers anyway? But of course, try telling that to a Singaporean teacher who refuses to accept that some people (like myself) are quite happy to get on with learning something new (like German) without a teacher and I am capable of proving myself in the work place without formal paper qualifications. For me, it is easy: all I need to do is to get myself in an interview or audition situation and start speaking German - the German people who are interviewing or auditioning me can hear within the first few minutes if my German is good enough or not once we start having a conversation. Perhaps it is a cultural thing whereby Singaporeans are so reliant on using paper qualifications to judge people that they forget to actually look up from the CV and start speaking to the candidate in front of them during a job interview. Maybe I can get away with this in Germany because we're dealing with a very different kind of culture with German people, but Singaporeans are so addicted to their paper qualifications. Perhaps it has something to do with putting Singaporean teachers on a pedestal, or it is something else cultural that isn't doesn't just affects Singapore and explains why stressed out students from South Korea to China to Japan are driven to suicide during exam periods. Thus for someone like Andy, within this cultural context, it is hard to think outside the box but yet that is exactly what he needs to do to help himself.

Finally, am I being overly harsh on Andy? I don't think so. I'm going to be 43 this year and have been in the working world an awfully long time - this much I can tell you as an older businessman. Things often go wrong in the business world: your best laid plans can go awry for a thousand and one reasons. We often then find ourselves in a situation where we are desperately looking for a plan B, C or D when we realize that plan A isn't going to work out in order to try to rescue the deal. This is a very important skill that one needs to use in the working world - even a teacher needs skills like that. Imagine if you have a difficult student who doesn't respond to your teaching methods, who do you do? Do you scream at the student and punish the student for not being like every other student? Or do you think on your feet and try to come up with a different approach to communicate with this student? In Andy's case, when I look at his CV, there are only two possibilities unfortunately: either he is admitting that he is too stupid to get better results if he resits his A levels, that those terrible grades are an accurate reflection of his intellect; or he is telling me that he is just too stubborn to adapt, to find a plan B when plan A doesn't work out. Either way, it is a very good excuse for me to reject someone like that because even if he is not genuinely stupid, he clearly has a gaping hole in his soft skills in being totally unable to adapt when things do go wrong. Would I want someone like that working in my company? Hell no, because in real life, things will go wrong and we have no control over that - all we can do is keep calm and adapt to the new circumstances. I would rather hire someone adaptable. So it isn't that I'm an elitist discriminating against people from private universities - I'm actually looking for people who have demonstrated that they do have vital soft skills to thrive in the harsh business world.

So that's it from me on this issue - over to you now, what are your thoughts on this topic? Have you ever met anyone like Andy, Brenda or Chris? If you had met Andy after he messed up his A levels, what kind of advice would you had given him at that point? What kind of advice would you give someone like Brenda then? Likewise, do you think it is helpful to put someone like Chris on a pedestal for all neighbourhood school students to aspire to? After all, Chris isn't stupid - he is very intelligent, he was just plain unlucky but managed to make things right eventually. Is it unfair to imply that all kids in neighbourhood schools can pull off what Chris did if they simply worked hard enough? All three of them: Andy, Brenda and Chris messed up one exam but why is Andy the one amongst the three of them who has been judged most harshly whilst Chris is being celebrated as an inspiration and role model? Have you ever truly messed up an exam and what were the consequences? Do let me know you what you think. Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.