8-yr-old girl does well in GCE ... says it’s a simple exam
As at today,
January 11th, 2013, nine-year-old Anjolaoluwa Mautin Botoku cannot
lay substantial claim to widespread fame. She has however served notice that
her name is one that the world should watch out for in the future.
At her very
young age of nine years, she has written a dreaded examination and did
creditably. The examination is the General Certificate of Education (GCE), the
private equivalent of the Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSCE) that
people wishing to gain admission into the university must pass in order to be
admitted.
GCE and SSCE are
however dreaded because many people are only able to pass them after years of
trying. So when little Anjola perused some of the GCE past question papers that
one of her brothers was studying and declared that she could take the GCE exam,
her brothers Jide and Olujuyin were both amused and incensed at her ‘impudence’
to the extent of deciding that they would register her for the exam so that she
could walk her talk.
Knowing that GCE
is not a piece of cake, the brothers probably knew that the only way their ‘brash,’
and therefore ‘annoying,’ little sister would eat the humble pie was if she
wrote the exam and did not do well in it.
So when they were
registering her for it and they encountered the problem of her being ineligible
for it as she was younger than the minimum age set for the exams, still wanting
her to eat the humble pie made them do what they shouldn’t really have done:
they increased her age by five years so that the online registration process
would register her.
And they
succeeded. She got registered for last year’s GCE and was listed to write it at
Victoria Island Secondary School, Lagos.
If her brothers
wanted to eat the humble pie, they succeeded somewhat when little Anjola
arrived at her exam centre.
Being a little
girl indeed, in both age and stature, she stood out among her fellow candidates
who attacked her immediately, saying, “Little girl, what are you doing here?
Are you sure you are here to write the exam?”
The above are
even nice comments. There were some really rude ones. “Over-ambitious girl, you
are not supposed to be here. Why don’t you wait for your time? You are very
greedy,” and on and on like that.
Even the
examiners didn’t want to allow her into the hall but only did so because the
biometric test they did proved that she was indeed the registered candidate.
Mrs Abosede
Botoku, her mother, says she expected that her fellow candidates would harass
her. “I expected that she would be harassed so I wasn’t surprised by it,” she
told Saturday Mirror.
And so Anjola
wrote the GCE, but she didn’t answer all the papers, she did just two, French
and English. “I wrote just French and English because I had teachers who
tutored me in them. My father is a former French teacher and my mother has a
degree in English so they both taught me those two subjects.”
When the results
were released, she made C5 in French and C6 in English. “I expected to make B2
or B3 in English and I’m disappointed I did not.”
Saturday Mirror
therefore asked her why she didn’t make the grade she expected in English, if
maybe the exam was very difficult for her.
“The exam was
very easy,” she retorted. “It wasn’t something that could be failed.”
Hazarding a
guess as to why she didn’t do as well as she expected in English, her mother
said, “I believe two things worked against her. The first is overconfidence. I
feel she was overconfident and it affected her. In my own days too, I was very
overconfident when I wanted to write English and I got a lower grade than I
expected.
“Another thing
that I believe affected her is the harassment she encountered from her fellow
candidates. I’m sure it affected her psychologically. The harassment was just
so harsh. People would walk up to her and say she should prove that she really
wrote the exam.”
So why did
little Anjola feel that she could write an exam far advanced for her age and
more suitable to her fourteen-year-old brother, Olujuyin?
“It’s the way
our parents brought us up,” she responded. “My mother is a magistrate and my
father a lawyer. They insist that we must read, and when they bring newspapers
home, it’s always a struggle between me and my brothers over who would read
them first.”
Technology is another
factor that also helped greatly in enhancing her intellect. She has ample
access to the internet and she had got to read about the feats of many young
people in other parts of the world and she felt she could be like them.
Such young
people include the youngest professor ever, Alia Sabur, who became a professor
at 18 years, an undergraduate at 10, and got her first degree at 14 from New
York State University.
Reacting to how
he feels about her remarkable feat, her father, Olufemi Botoku, said, “It all
began like a joke between her and her brothers, but it has proven how
intelligent and hardworking she is, so I’m happy for her.”
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