Storm van Gastel (19) from Hooge Zwaluwe received the most dreaded call for exam candidates: he had failed. A day later he received another call: he had passed after all and does not have to resit on Thursday. “I discovered an error,” he says.
He is still upset about it and calls what happened to him a ‘roller coaster of events’. That journey started last week, when he got on the phone with his teacher from the Newman College in Breda.
Bad news on the phone
It was bad news: he had one too many unsatisfactory marks on his grade list. “At first I had the feeling that I had succeeded. I had learned so well. Failing felt strange,” he says.
His thoughts went in all directions. “I thought: do I have to repeat a year? I can retake it, but then I have to start learning again,” he explains. In order to perhaps still pass his final HAVO exams, he could resit geography. So a day after the annoying phone call, he went to school to see his test.
Question eight is still good
In retrospect it was a golden move, because he discovered that question eight had been calculated incorrectly, while he had actually got it right. Storm was dumbfounded. “My teacher said: I think you actually passed.”
To prove that, Storm went into action mode. Phone calls and emails went back and forth to the exam secretary, and he visited the second teacher who had marked his exam. He did everything he could to demonstrate that the multiple choice question was really good.
The redeeming phone call
And that turned out to be true. At the end of the day he received the redeeming phone call. His 5.1 became a 5.4, meaning he still passed. “It was very bizarre, a unique experience. Very, very, very crazy. It almost felt otherworldly,” he sums up. “At home they didn’t believe me at first.”
A retake was no longer necessary. Storm is now assured of a start in the nursing course at Avans University of Applied Sciences. And he celebrated that well. “I opened a champagne bottle at home and toasted the results,” he says enthusiastically. “And there’s a big party coming up.”