Failing my English composition

There was a collective gasp of worry when my Primary Six form teacher (also my English teacher) announced that there was one failure in the mid-year English composition exam. That made up for 50% of the English grade.

Then for lack of tact, she announced my name to the whole class and even proceeded to explain in detail why I had failed.

At my time (1987), the English composition exam consisted of a few choices of questions. There is almost certainly one where you were painted a scenario in the form of a few sentences and have to continue the story, aka "The Short Story Question".

I had attempted that question during that exam. The scenario given was one of teenage shoplifting. I thought I would give the usual way of tackling such questions a twist by completing the short story in half the number of words allocated and spend the other half doing a short discussion on the phenomena of teenage shoplifting.

That proved to be my downfall. I was informed, actually the whole class was informed in a stern manner, that for a "Short Story Question", you HAVE TO write a full short story. Nothing else is acceptable. So I was marked out of point and hence awarded the failure mark. And to rub it in, I was given 24.5 out of 50.

That was the exact moment I knew how our education system worked.