Being in that relaxed mood, the invigilator’s attention was drawn towards her. The huge and heavily built woman came to where she was sitting to inspect her work.
“Young woman, are you through with providing answers to the questions in section A?” she asked, as she observed her from her big rimmed spectacles.
“Yes Ma,” Ifeoma, nervously replied and bent her head towards her script, an act to deceive the woman into believing that she had been serious in the exam.
“What are you then waiting for? Continue with the second part and start solving. You don’t have all the time in the world at your disposal,” the woman advised and walked away. When the invigilator’s gaze returned to Ifeoma again, she noticed that the girl was then very nervous. The boy, sitting beside her had already finished answering the questions and was about to give the paper where he had copiously written the answers to some questions for Ifeoma. He became scared when he noticed that the invigilator’s gaze was fixed on their direction and waited, ignoring Ifeoma’s pestering. But when he finally summoned courage and passed the folded sheet of paper to her, the invigilator caught them red-handed. She saw the white paper and raised alarm and immediately disciplined them.
The rest of the examinations were very disappointing to Ifeoma. She barely read for them. While other students were hopeful, Ifeoma was filled with anxiety. She had known she performed badly in the exam, and the thought of disappointing her parents haunted her. ‘If only I had known, I would have been more serious with my studies,’ she lamented.
Four months after the exam, the results were published. What she saw, when she printed out the result online brought tears to her eyes. She covered her face in shame and ran off to a secluded area where she looked at the results more carefully. The only subject she passed with credit was Economics. She failed the rest of the subjects. Her results just had one C, and 7Fs as grade points. When she got home and reluctantly showed the results to her parent, they were very mad at her poor academic performance. Her Mathematics was not released. Her accomplice in the exam, Charles, passed all his papers, except Mathematics, which was also seized. He greatly regretted offering help to Ifeoma in the exam hall. The day he saw her at school, he scornfully looked and did not utter a single word to her.
Ifeoma’s parents did not expect such a woeful failure from their daughter, whom they had spent huge sums of money to train. They knew that their daughter had some academic challenges. Little did they know that she was not as intelligent as they had once believed. Her father did not spare her at all. He scolded her and threatened to give her away to any willing man for marriage if she continued to fail her exams. Her younger sister, Anurika who had sat for the Junior School Certificate Examination about the same tome, had P’s and F’s as grades in her result. However, she was promoted to the next class, since she luckily passed both Mathematics and the English Language.
