The Scholastic Maladies of Karry Valentine.

Poor, poor Mr. Valentine... He really does not deserve this kind of trauma... I digress, allow me to tell you the whole story.

Yesterday I got the results back for all of my january modules, and for most of them I was pretty pleased! When I say "all", I actually just mean "three", and when i say "pretty please", i mean 2 of those were quite exemplary and I am well chuffed. RS however, now that's a very different story.

I went to the RS class to be greeted by a very maudlin mood, I would even go so far as to say morose, or perhaps melancholic. It turns out the marking on our coursework was akin to the saddest of greek tragedies, an utter travesty, a sham, a mockery of our scholastic system! Some of those expected to do well had done well, very well infact, however, some of us had our estimated marks mangled out of all recognition. I was set to get a high A for it, it had been marked and corelated by all of the RS staff as being roughly worth 82/90 (which is actually 41/45, meaning I dropped 4 marks on the whole thing). When the results came in, however our examiner had marked mine at an E.

I was distraught.

Mr. Valentine, our moral and ethical guide through the course, was equally as deflated. It wasn't just me you see; people writing of the same capability as myself did even worse. A friend of mine, incredibly capable, got a U, and another a D. Mr. Valentine had never had marks this bad in all of his teaching career, and he couldn't for the life of him figure out why. There was a point, in my eyes, where he delved so deep into his instantaenious depression that he just sat there and was almost moved to tears.

The papers come back on thursday and we'll be going through the examiners comments. If they are utter rubbish he and Miss Rudd, our other RS teacher, may consider sending them back to be remarked. If that doesn't happen then I'll have to sit an exam to make up the marks.

I just can't believe it happened though! As a result of that, i could never bring my overall RS result back up to an A, and all of my prospective universities require a grade A in RS atleast. In fact, I would need to average over 110% on the last two papers to get my A standard back.

It's enough to make a man weep.