COTE x Naruto: New Beginnings

Chapter 32: Planning for the Exam

The next day during class, Horikita came in front of the class and addressed everyone about a plan for the Paper Shuffle exam.

"Chabashira-sensei told us that only one or two pairs get expelled each year, correct?" She started her speech by asking them a quesiton. Everyone was a bit too stunned to see Horikita out of all people speaking up to react much. Instead, they were whispering amongst each other.

"That's true," Hirata said, breaking the silence.

"That means that the school chooses the pairs in a way that balances things out, wouldn't you agree? If it didn't, then more pairs would surely be expelled. For example, if Sudo got grouped in with Ike, they would surely get expelled."

The two in question shuddered, not wanting to image being expelled.

"That's why I believe that the student groups in the students with high score with the students with a low score to average everything out. Does that make sense?"

A few people were nodding along, the explanation making sense to them.

"Huh? But why did people get expelled anyway, then?" Ike asked cluelessly. This time, Sakura answered.

"There might have been an inbalance in those classes. That is to say, the amount of bad scoring students was greater than those with above average scores. That means that a student with a below average score could've gotten paired with a student with an average or even below average score, so they didn't balance each other out," she suggested. She'd thought of the same strategy as Horikita and had wanted to speak up about it too, but Horikita beat her to it.

"So what do we do?" A worried Ike asked, not wanting to get expelled under any circumstances, especially since he was at a huge risk being one of the worst scoring students in their class.

Horikita had a solution for that too. "Either we can do nothing and trust that each of us scores during the mock exam as we would during the real thing, or we can create three or four groups depending on our grades and scores. The worst group will deliberately score 0 points during the mock exam, the average group will score 1 point during the mock exam and finally, the group made of the above average group will score 2 points," Horikita suggested.

Deciding to finally speak up, Sakura cleared her throat before standing up. "I think we should split into four groups. After all, the students in one group aren't all equally good at academics, are they? If we create four groups, we can decrease the chance of the worst student in the better group being grouped with the worst student in the worse group."

Horikita nodded, finding this to be a good compromise. "That's fine. In that case, we'll also create four study groups to study for the exam. We must make sure that we beat the class we choose to compete against - for that, I suggest Class C."

Murmurs broke out in the class. "But Horikita-san, what if another class chooses Class C? Then we'd have to draw lots and we might not win," Chiaki spoke up worriedly.

"I don't think we have any chance against Class B or Class A. Going against Class C might be our only choice. Therefore, it doesn't matter if we don't get chosen to compete against them, because even if we chose another class we wouldn't have a chance to win."

This seemed confusing to some of their classmates, but most understand the logic.

"How can you say that for sure? We don't even know how smart the other classes are academically," Shinohara argued. Sakura was rather surprised to see her speaking up about something exam related as she usually gave off the vibe that she didn't care.

Horikita didn't have an answer to that. Hirata spoke up instead. "I think we should go along with Horikita-san's plan. It is true that we might not know the academic prowess of the other classes, but we do know that they were deemed as our betters by the school, and from what I've observed, being academically bad is enough to get some of our classmates placed into Class D."