Numbers don’t lie – Anna Marie Galea
If there’s one day that every Maltese adult remembers, it’s receiving their MATSEC O level results. I received mine in the first year that you could opt to receive them by mobile phone and, ever the Luddite and suspicious of machines (for some reason, I thought that they might make a mistake and send me the wrong results), I opted to wait for them to arrive by post. This did not turn out to be the best idea. For days, after many of our other friends had received the good or bad news, my best friend and I would wait beside our respective letter boxes for the postman to arrive every morning. We didn’t go to the beach or for a quick walk; we just waited like forlorn Jane Austen characters expecting news from the latest rich man with a sizeable estate. When they finally arrived, and I almost ripped them to shreds with anxiety, I was very aware that this was the first major stepping stone into my future. At 16, my life was already taking shape in a significant way. In a sense, the rest of your academic life and the trajectory you will probably take depends on those results. There have been many debates about the fairness of judging people by their qualifications, especially at such a...