The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective (主观的) assessment by some anonymous (匿名的) examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of (大量) hastily scrawled　(草草写就的) scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight. (他们的话举足轻重) After a judge’s decision you have the right of appeal (上诉), but not after an examiner’s. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities. Is it cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them? This is what it boils down to (=comes down to; is briefly or basically) in the last analysis (归根 到底). (事情归根到底就是如此) The best comment on the system is this illiterate (liuxuepaper Note:语文多差错的) message recently scrawled on a wall: ‘I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire.