The invigilator raised her head and stared at the clock.
It hadn’t even been an hour since the papers were handed out.
In other words, this student had only spent a handful of minutes on each question.
And yet, she was still able to solve them perfectly.
The invigilator herself had spent almost 30 minutes on the first question alone.
She decided to go over the rest of Yao Tang’s answer sheet.
Sure enough, her solutions remained consistent in their simplicity.
The invigilator didn’t even need to verify them since they were so clear and concise.
It took her another half hour to finally finish.
At that point, her forehead was beaded with sweat. She reached up to wipe it and sighed.
After going through Yao Tang’s methods, she couldn’t help but feel inadequate in her math-solving skills. A sense of shame washed over her.
But then, a thought occurred to her—was this ability normal for high school students?
Or was it just that this batch of examinees was extremely talented compared to the previous ones in the past?
She swept a gaze over the classroom and spotted several students scratching their heads, their brows furrowed in frustration.
No, they were just the same as the other students she had supervised before.
That meant that Yao Tangwas a special case.
Unbeknownst to all of them, the sudden leap in difficulty levels of the exam was all because of Yao Tang.
It had been more than a decade since someone had gotten a perfect score in the Math Olympiad Competition. The board of examiners naturally thought that a promising seedling had appeared at last.
The entire Math Olympiad Committee had been stunned when they had first heard of it.
Furthermore, Principal Kongcouldn’t stop gushing aboutYao Tangto anyone who cared to listen. This prompted the Committee to change the questions at the last minute and raise the bar.
What was originally meant to be a mid-to-high-level difficulty test turned into a full-blown high-level challenge.
They had even set the last question to be on master-level, something that only veteran experts could solve.
The Committee members determined to see just how far Yao Tang’s math skills went. As a consequence, they failed to consider the fact that the rest of the examinees would bear the brunt of the test.
Nevertheless, the poor students had no choice but to persevere.
Among them, Yao Ran was one of those who floundered the most.
She frowned at her test papers, feeling like her skull was about to crack.
She had been staying in the hospital prior to the competition and didn’t get the chance to review properly. The most she had done was to pick out random questions and solve them.
To Yao Ran’s utter dismay, the questions that came out in the exam seemed to have been pulled from different lessons entirely. She couldn’t even comprehend most of the problems, let alone come up with a coherent solution.
Just like before, she had also bribed someone from the administrative office who was in charge of printing out the test papers.
As a precaution against cheating, the Committee had produced two sets of questions and assigned them as test papers A and B.
Yao Ran had received both copies, and as her personal precaution, she had memorized both sets.
But her efforts were obviously in vain, because these weren’t the same test papers she had memorized! They must have been switched at the last minute.
Yao Ran slumped in her chair, her brain buzzing with panic.
She tried to calm herself several times, but she only grew more desperate by the second.
By the time the exams were over, she felt like a fish out of water. Her body was drenched in cold sweat, and there was a constant ringing in her ear.
Still, she managed to overhear a discussion among the students nearby.
“This year’s exam was too difficult, right? Tell me I’m not the only one! Is there even a student who could solve those ridiculous questions?”
“Oh? I don’t really feel any different from last year.”
“What? Does that mean I just suck so much that I couldn’t answer the test questions?”
“No, what I mean is that, just like last year, I have no idea how to solve the questions this time, either.”
“Wait, what did you say? Someone handed in their paper in less than an hour?”
“No way! That’s just not possible.”
Apart from being unable to answer the exam, there was one other thing these examinees had in common. They had all joined the competition with the intent to bag the prize.