There for Me

Exam

Ichinose Pov

One week had passed since the opening ceremony and everyone had come back fresh and rejuvenated ready to face the new year.

The technological changes still feel out of place, but we have adapted to them helping lessons run even smoother since all our textbooks and resources are housed in a 12 inch tablet. Forgetting textbooks or misplacing resources was a thing of the past and coupled with the fact that the tablets weren't allowed to be taken home eradicated that problem.

Using the tablets to slack off during class was tempting, but we know better.

During our first period Hoshinomiya-sensei introduced us to the OverAll Ability app, OAA app for short, which is a mandatory app to be installed across all three year groups allowing anyone and everyone to see someone's OAA rating.

There are 4 assessment areas which then factor into our overall ability rating, similar to a video game's rating system.

During Sensei's explanation I took the time to quickly check everyone's ratings, mainly focusing on academic and physical abilities.

Out of the four individual areas these two are the ones we have the most control over and will be the ones that change the most so identifying our strong and weak students now would help us moving forward.

Our overall academic ability was quite strong as demonstrated in the Paper Shuffle last year, but I couldn't quite say the same for our physical.

Despite having won the Sports Festival our physical ability was still slightly lacking as we had no one with an A- or above, but for the majority of the class some simple training regimes will help raise the average.

Then as the second period arrived Sensei moved onto explaining the details of our first special exam of this year.

"Information about the rules, rewards, penalties and other stuff will be available on your tablets so if you want to follow along and make your own notes while I speak then go ahead" Sensei said a split second before a chorus of 'ping!'s washed over us.

Sent to our tablets by the school was an email containing the rules, rewards and penalties for the exam.

"For this exam you will be pairing up with your cute little kouhais and sitting a written exam with them. Basically the a mix of the Paper Shuffle and midterms"

The basic premise for the exam is actually very simple: If you and your partner's combined score falls below 500 marks, both you and your partner will be facing a punishment. For the first years, they won't receive any private points for the next three months meanwhile for us second years the punishment is expulsion.

Expulsion as a punishment is something we have become uncomfortably used to, but thankfully so far we have yet to lose a single classmate compared to classes D, B and A, but my stomach still tightens every time we face the risk of expulsion.

Class points are distributed in a very straightforward manner through the use of class averages and just like we have done with every exam we would give this one our all to.

However unlike the Paper Shuffle where we were assigned a partner based on test scores this time we will be scouting and selecting our partner ourselves through the OAA app.

Break time arrived and I instantly took to the podium.

"Everyone" I paused making sure I captured everyone's attention before continuing. "First of all I would like to say don't be disheartened by your OAA scores because like Sensei said if you do well in these exams and future tests they will improve"