The last week of July has been quite, well, memorable to me.

On the 25th, this past Thursday, I took the Philippine Career Service Professional Exam.

Shock of shocks, my score was 95.95. Sans review and sans sanity.

The Civil Service test I took was Computer-Assisted, which was a lot more efficient and fun compared to the traditional pencil-and-paper one. The latter type of exam will be given to a large number of people come October.

The computer test took three hours. After the allotted time has been consumed, the screen just froze up and the user was automatically logged out. Neat programming.

To top it all off, the results were handed out just 30 minutes after the end of the test proper. No more weeks of tense waiting that way. The exam was multiple choice, with 150 scored items. The passing grade was a highly discriminating 80.

Out of the 15 of us who took the test that day, only four passed, staying in the “standard” percentage of 25-30% passers out of the total takers. The other three who passed the exam scored in the mid-80s range.