Battlefield: Tomorrow.

KUCHING: Tomor­row marks the begin­ning of the week-long finals bat­tle between Swin­burne foun­da­tion stu­dents and test papers.

On the front lines, we have Aca­d­e­mic Writ­ing and Engi­neer­ing Math. While Aca­d­e­mic Writ­ing might pose a rather easy tar­get, ana­lysts say, the strong­hold of Engi­neer­ing Math is deemed to bring a tough fight. Con­fi­dence, how­ever, of win­ning the Engi­neer­ing Math bat­tle are sail­ing high.

“We will def­i­nitely nail Engi­neer­ing Math,” pledges an opti­mistic student.

Forces on the other side, how­ever, were equally moti­vated for vic­tory. “They have no idea of what will they be fac­ing,” warns an anony­mous test paper who only wants to be iden­ti­fied as ‘Engi­neer­ing Math’, adding, “They will not be pre­pared for what we have in store for them.”

The sound of rustling papers fills the scene here at the Ground Floor Audi­to­rium of Swinburne’s main block, where tomorrow’s bat­tles are expected to take place, as test papers make their final preparations.

Mean­while, stu­dents back in their respec­tive bases are also run­ning through test-runs on their ulti­mate weapon against the test papers, the cal­cu­la­tor, dubbed — the mother of all weapons. In this semester’s bat­tle, two major vari­ants of cal­cu­la­tors are expected to be seen in the bat­tle­field, the generic Casio Fx-570 and its elder brother, the invin­ci­ble TI-84 graph­i­cal cal­cu­la­tor, designed to pen­e­trate the heav­i­est defences the test papers might have in place.

While the stu­dents cheer on, bran­dish­ing their ‘mother of all weapons’, the test papers look on over the hori­zon with­out the slight­est tinge of fear. Pre­lim­i­nary intel­li­gence reports indi­cate that the test papers might just have cre­ated their best defence sys­tem yet — known as the BCIAD (Bloody Com­plex Inte­grals and Dif­fer­en­tials) which, some weapons experts argue, might just ren­der the TI-84 useless.

On how these weapon sys­tems would fare against each other, only time will tell.

All eyes of the world, how­ever, are on Friday’s bat­tle of Physics B. Some call it the cli­max of the war.

“It is sui­cide,” a stu­dent gravely recalls, “only a few have ever sur­vived that dreaded battle.”

The world looks on.
—-
ember is a vet­eran bat­tle­field reporter who is cur­rently dis­patched on-scene at Swinburne’s Ground Floor audi­to­rium. He has pre­vi­ously made cov­er­age pos­si­ble in notable bat­tle­fields such as the great 2006 SPM bat­tle and the 2004 PMR war. His vast expe­ri­ence in cov­er­ing live reports from bat­tle­fields makes him our best war cor­re­spon­dent yet.