Like thousands of other Maltese youths my nephew is sitting for his ‘O’ Level SEC exams. This past week he sat for the two papers in English Literature, my favourite hobby even today.
Upon enquiry my nephew told me that he felt confused on how best to answer a multiple choice question concerning an “unprepared prose”, the title or origin of which is not given in the paper. The question rested on limited and contradictory clues in the selected text, and the multiple choice answers would have required the services of the famous investigator Poirot.
In reality there is no proper answer if one does not know the rest of the story, and my nephew and other students may have easily lost a valuable mark innocently.
The multiple choice question does not make sense in the context of the quoted “unprepared prose”. Based on the clues found exclusively in the provided text, every student was expected to determine the age of Mary, i.e. whether she was three, 10 or 18 years old, and give a correct answer to earn one mark. One mark may make a difference between one grade and another.
My nephew and perhaps some others knew that in reality Mary was about 10 years old because of prior knowledge of the prose in question, but in this case there was no clear clue in the actual quotation cited in the exam paper. The students were not asked to give their reasons for their choice of answer, any one of which may be valid.
Basically, Section 2 of Paper 1 provided a long quotation of the “unprepared prose”, which my nephew identified as being taken from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book The Secret Garden, that he had once read. It is extracted from roughly the second page of Chapter 15, which for clarity’s sake includes: “On that first morning when the sky was blue again Mary wakened very early … (and what follows is important:) … She had learned to dress herself by this time and she put on her clothes in five minutes. ...(and till) ...rust-red head of Dickon, who was kneeling on the grass working hard.” I will let the readers find out the full text.
Concerning Mary’s hypothetical age based on this quotation: most children learn to dress at age three, so Mary may have been three years old. There is no clue that she had arrived from India where servants dressed her up till she was astonishingly a 10-year-old girl. Judging from Mary’s other actions in the quoted text, she must have been much older than three years, because she wandered out very early in the morning to the garden that was far, so one would choose age 10 or 18 based on these actions alone, though 18 would have been preferable in such a case.
In conclusion, this multiple choice question was most unreasonable and misleading for any student who had not previously read the novel. I do hope that the Board of Examiners will take this matter into consideration when awarding marks. Allowing students to give reasons for their choice would have been better.