Examinations

‘Auntie, I didn’t pass the board.  Don’t worry, I’m feeling guilty but fine.  I’ll try again this May.  Thanks for your prayers.’  It was a bittersweet message on the mobile phone that I received from a niece some months back.  She happens to be the niece I have always regarded as someone who’s keeping a monster of a genius somewhere in her, waiting to be unleashed.

The news in the first sentence was obviously not good.  I got over that quickly.  It may not be good, but neither was it catastrophic.  What stood out though was the courage shown in the next two sentences.  For that I didn’t erase the message from my mobile phone all these months.

Aaahhh, examinations.  Boards and bars, entrance tests, exit tests whose results are called final grades, intelligence quotients, and even emotional quotients here and there.  There were those so-called revalidas of old, back when schools deemed high in academic standard didn’t settle for passing written examinations alone.  Grades had to be revalidated, and further defended, with oral exams.

Then there is this physical examination.  And an examination of conscience.  It seems we take examinations to be able to do something in almost anything in our pre-retirement lives.  These may be throwbacks, perhaps, to our primeval instincts, a civilized way to make a case for the survival of the fittest.  Whatever, examinations are here to stay, a part of the civilized world we have to contend with now and then.

But woe to the man, woman, and all those in the gray areas in-between the two genders if they equate passing an examination with their worth as persons.

There are a thousand and one reasons why one fails.  A crippling ache of the last wisdom tooth, insufficient preparation, a headache, stomachache, earache, heartache, over-preparation that has short-circuited the brain, and diarrhea during the examinations.  Or one had actually passed but had ranked eleventh and only ten will be accepted.  The list is endless, but it does not include a diminished person because of failure.

Sour grapes or sweet lemon, sometimes it does pay to fail.  Failing may be a wake-up call for one to look inward, to decide to do away with some things, like a runaway ambition or a career where one couldn’t really fit.  Who can say if a measure of wisdom and calm is achieved in the process?  ‘To attain knowledge, add things; to attain wisdom, remove things,’ the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tze had said.

There also exists such a thing as a different test, a sort of measurement for one’s trajectory of courage.  Failing, and taking the failure well, is passing in flying colors.  My niece who surprised me with the text message is one such.  She would make any parent proud.

Her case reminds me once more of a certain examination, the toughest mental (to differentiate it from the physical) test I know hereabouts.  Sometimes, for one reason or other, three thousand take the test and only three make it.  The exam is toughest only because of the minuscule size of its passing rate.

This particular examination had left in its wake a veritable who’s who of those who didn’t make it.  Some went on to eventually become cabinet members.  Others have built successful political careers that propelled them to the legislative halls.  Still others became great lawyers earning much, much more than what the potential career of that tough examination could offer.  Failing, for them, is no deterrent to pursue other fields with greater success.  And I know a lawyer who took the bar and failed, took it again the following year, and ended up as the topnotcher.  He was no quitter.
Which is why I wish the best for current local barristers Mitzi I., Vanessa Hontucan, Arturo Jed Piollo, and their batchmates, whoever they are.  As the months pass by the knots in their stomach may grow tighter.  Whatever the results, they are not any less, or more, as persons.  As my niece Kay Apalisok had shown, while passing an examination is good, to be unsinkable is far, far better.  I’m sure Jasper C. agrees with me.

Besides, a bar is just one among many bars, boards and other exams.  There is still this ultimate of tests that we all must pass no matter what:  the test of living.  We know we have passed it because when a door closes, we learn to fly out the window.  From that vantage point, one may realize that there is nothing behind that closed door after all.

(Dec 2005)