German Teenager Gets Job Offer By Trying To Use FOI For His Exam Papers

Bruce66423 writes "A German schoolboy has taken exam preparation to ingenious new levels by making a freedom of information request to see the questions in his forthcoming Abitur tests, the equivalent of A-levels in the UK." and SATS in the USA. The media attention from his FoI request has already garnered him an offer of work from another transparency-related organization, the research website Correctiv. “If I have time before university starts I’ll definitely do it,” he said.

Comments

Re:Cheating

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure it could be considered cheating if he was legally given the questions by someone with the authority to do so.

Re:Guardian scum

[OzPeter]

Who the fuck writes "but keeps revising in likelihood request is denied". That isn't even English.

I hate to burst your bubble, but that is English, and British English at that. Revise is being used in the sense of to study:

reread work done previously to improve one's knowledge of a subject, typically to prepare for an examination.
"students frantically revising for exams"

Perhaps your knowledge of English, is shall we say .. in need of revision?

Re:Guardian scum

[ledow]

I see the word: Revise.

I think: To look again. To revisit.

Just because you don't use it in that sense, doesn't mean others can't.

What bothers me about American English speakers is not that they've never heard these words - that's fair enough - but that they can't infer their meaning from the context and from the potential meaning of the words.

Pavement. Yeah, it's an odd word. But it's obviously something that's paved. Paving. Words that you have in your "dialect" too. The inference, however, never seems to be made.

And yet, when Americans/Canadians use words oddly, we're required to understand what they mean.

You don't need to be spot-on, but sometimes just a brief stint in etymology or even thinking of similar-sounding word-roots would help immensely in your understanding of "our" language.

details

[Tom]

TFA (and many articles on the subject - disclaimer: I live in Germany and read local news sources, too) forgets to mention something important which is very likely the reason that he gets job offers:

He didn't just send a "here's my cute idea" letter. He actually studied the law in question, his letter is said to be full of legalese mentioning all the important paragraphs. The letter is so that the agency responsible for handling them is now looking if they can find an actual, valid reason to refuse his request, because they couldn't on purely formal reasons (which they usually use when refusing a request they don't like).