I am an 18 years old Turkish male, and it’s my final year at high school. So after my 12’th grade ends, I’ll have to participate in a couple of tests to enter a decent university. This actually isn’t a problem for me, though. The thing I was going for was going way higher. I was first in my class in middle school, and generally got called a genius. This increased the expectations of me and my family. Then i started to high school and my grades dropped from about 99.8 to 85s. Luckily though, my family didn’t make a bug deal of that, but I did. My entire class ended up cheating in exams after a while, but i was stubborn not to do that, so my grades were way below average. 

So the point system of the university exams works like this: the maximum points you can get is 560. 100 points are given to everyone, 400 is from the tests and the remaining 60 is from your average high school grades, multiplied by 3/5. So this gave me about 8 points of disadvantage from the beginning. I was worried about this a lot, which prevented me from sleeping sometimes. Then I joined a discord server and made great friends, which helped a lot.

Basically the two exams I mentioned are way different from each other. First one had easier topics but had an infamously little amount of time given. Second one harder topics but with more time and less questions. And the first one was way more important in my eye, since I had to solve 120 questions in 135 minutes. I kid you not, you have to literally speedrun the test. Even being able to see and think about every question was every single sane high scholars dream. 

Once a week, I’m having a practice exam and I slowly kept getting faster and faster, improved my strategy, increased my reading speed yet I kept leaving a few unsolved questions before the time ends. But for this week, it went way different. I somehow managed to solve all but two of the questions and still had about 7 minutes remaining. I was absolutely shocked and shaking. After 2 minutes of periodic inhale-exhaling, I got to work and solved one of the remaining questions and fixed a mistake in another. This was huge. This gave me more than enough hope about my future as someone not working full time for minimum wage. I still haven’t checked how many questions i actually managed to guess correctly, but honestly, I am pretty confident that it would be my best ever.

Btw that 8 points of disadvantage can suck my dick, so can the depression.