Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

Truly a scholarly journey
By Heshan Priyatilake
Imagine going on an all-expenses paid three-day trip to London, complete with a tour of Buckingham palace, a chance to shop at the Mecca of retail, Oxford Street, and the opportunity to see the inside of the office where the London O/Level and A/Level papers are marked.

For four academic geniuses, that was how they spent their first week of August. Having obtained the best London Edexcel O/level results in the country in 2004, the Edexcel office in Sri Lanka treated these four brilliant students to a trip to be remembered.

Aroshi Ranasinghe, regional developmental manager for Edexcel in Sri Lanka and Maldives, chaperoned the students through the winding streets of Central London, visiting places such as Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Nelson’s Column and The London Museum in Russell Square. “I’m sure the kids loved the trip despite the weather being slightly chilly compared to Colombo,” said Aroshi. Although there were three boys and just one girl on the team, Oxford Street seemed to be the highlight of the trip, which goes to prove that it’s not just girls who can be shopaholics!

The best candidate with 12 A grades was Ryan Samaratunga, who did a variety of different subjects such as geography, Information Technology, human biology, and a maths course meant only for the most able mathematics students.

The other three students got 10 A grades. The three male candidates are currently in their final year at Colombo International School, (CIS), while the girl, Prerna Jain is currently in India, after completing her O/Levels also at CIS. It is interesting to see how these fine youngsters with such promising futures cope with their heavy workloads. Following is a breakdown on each of the three boys and their hopes for the future. Prerna was unavailable for interview as she is currently in India.

The number of A grades for London examinations seems to be ever increasing and the popular notion is to believe that exams are getting easier and more children are being spoon-fed and memorise answers to question papers, but according to Aroshi it is an unfair assumption. “Children are now allowed greater access to a wider variety of study material and are increasingly more competitive, so I’d like to think that instead of the examinations getting easier, children are getting better,” she added with a smile.

Ryan Samaratunga:
Ryan deserves special mention due to his incredible performance at the O/Level examination – he obtained the highest number of O/Level A grades in any one sitting in the history of Edexcel in Sri Lanka and managed to obtain two world prizes in mathematics and chemistry and several other ‘top ten in the world’ prizes. He manages to balance his work with sports such as tennis, squash, swimming, basketball and is a regular at the gym, where he does weight training and (occasionally, he tells me) fat burning workouts!

“I used to play at lot of different sports but now I have concentrated on cricket,” said Ryan. He is the senior cricket captain and is also a senior house captain. Ryan appears to be a well-balanced 17-year-old, totally contradictory to the clichéd ‘nerd’ that one tends to associate with such academic merit.

Far from being a bookworm, he spends a lot of his time with his family and friends. He comes from a family of academics, with his brother Dimitri, also a past scholar from CIS, who is now on a scholarship programme undertaking his pre medical studies at The University of Pennsylvania, USA, while Ryan’s father Tilak, was the former dean of Mathematics at the University of Colombo. Ryan is still unsure about what he wants to do when he grows up, but wants to keep his options open. He is currently undertaking five A/Level subjects including Further Mathematics and Biology, and has obtained an amazing 97.3% average for his first set of A/Level units this year.

Anuk Arudpragasm and Arvinda Atukorala
Both boys have been scholars at CIS, and shared the same O-level combination of subjects which included Geography, French and History and the various science subjects offered by CIS such as human biology and physics. But Arvinda and Anuk are two very different people.

Arvinda hopes to pursue a degree in electrical engineering in the UK and dwells more on the arts, while Anuk plays tennis at a national level and is a fitness fan. “I love long distance running,” said Anuk. The boys liked different subjects but Arvinda pointed out that Information Technology was the easiest due the amount of coursework involved which can be carefully planned and done over the span of a month rather than two hours, as in the case of traditional written examinations. Arvinda and Anuk both agreed that history was perhaps the hardest subjects due to the depth of the syllabus.

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