How to “cheat” in an objective exam

Despite my day long blog-athon on Wednesday, I may have neglected to mention that I was, in fact, also revising for my Gov3 exam – Government & Politics Unit 3: Features of a Representative Democracy – which I sat on Thursday.

As far as re-sites fo, it wasn’t particularly horrible. In fact, the one problem I had is common to all my G&P exams, and that is neutrality: one needs to analyse the topic with an objective eye.

Well, I’ve enver had a major problem with this, because I know the best way to understand an issue, and thus reach a fully-informed decision, is to look at it from all angles, giving equal voice to both sides of the argument.

So when the topic of free votes was raised in this exam, my limits were well and truly tested. I bit my lip as I read the question (which, by the way, I chose to answer), as this is one of the issues I feel strongly about, and decided to “cheat”.

Before you start researching the AQA’s contact details to report illegal behaviour, I’m not being literal – there were just two of us taking the exam and I was practically naked (the jacket I was wearing as I walked in, which contains everything from my phone and USB pen to random bits of paper and the New Testament I was presented upon joining the ATC, was taken off of me when I walked into the exam room, and returned to me upon leaving).

What I mean is that, when you want to put across your personal opinion in an essay, you don’t state it matter-of-factly, like some delusional left-wing politico. Instead, you start the sentence with wording along the lines of “some people believe that”, before writing down your personal opinions whilst still managing to sound more like a right-wing analyst.

It is such a simple way to blag your way through the exam – not only are you putting your point across, but you are showing you appreciate public opinion. After all, you are not likely to be wrong, in the end. Chances are, if you believe in the underlying democratic principles of free votes, there are others who also believe in them.

Back in the exam, I put pen to paper and started to write the eight mark mini-essay on what free votes are, their strong democratic values (a factual point, I hasten to add), how pointless they can sometimes be and how some people believe they are abhorrently under-used in what is supposed to be a representative democracy. No bias there, of course.

At the end of the essay, you have to write an informed conclusion based on your “discussion”. Again, you can pretty much write what you like, as long as your argument is sound – after all, as Lee Stroble writes in The Case for Christ, “evidence can be aligned to point in more than one direction”.

I fully intend to repeat the mini-essay for the benefits of this blog, but let’s just say that, in my exam, I argued my corner as well ass anybody in my position, and came to the well thought out conclusion that free votes are a necessity to legitimise Parliament as a House of representatives, rather than the lobby fodder masquerading as MPs it contains today.

And that is how you can create a seemingly objective, yet still biased, argument. The BBC already know how to do this – they’ve been doing so for years!