To some extent, the easiest one to become is the top student. As for the academic god and the academic rogue, those two are about equally hard. The real difference from a top student lies in study methods.

An academic god needs no explanation. They're basically the product of talent, skill, and hard work.

An academic rogue, though, is all about focusing on the big stuff and letting the small stuff go. Use the shortest time to solve the most problems. Or to put it another way, an academic rogue is just a nerfed academic god.

The core logic is simple: I don't have to love studying, but I have to know how to ace exams.

The method is this: grasp the core framework and logic of the subject, and become the test setter's kindred spirit.

Politics has a framework a lot like a tree diagram. In middle school, subjective politics questions let you flip through the textbook, so the real memorization focus is on multiple-choice. At the same time, you need to mark the table of contents with the info for each test point...

History's timeline is a natural fishbone diagram...

For middle school math, the hard part is geometry. The standard method is drawing auxiliary lines. But for smaller exams, you can probably get away with using out-of-syllabus knowledge. The root-testing method is also a solid choice.

Feng Yijiu quickly flipped through the math textbook's table of contents. At the same time, she pulled out a test paper to compare against it. With the help of the contents page, she soon linked all those knowledge points together.

Chemistry's key lies in the details. Equations act as nodes, connecting and supporting each knowledge point...

Physics knowledge is more like a graph structure. Different sections are connected, yet relatively independent. And middle school physics is the foundation of physics as a whole, like a base. Rather than testing specific questions, it's more like testing your physical reasoning.

...

If before, Feng Yijiu had only planned to coast on what she already knew and score whatever she could, now she planned to properly show the bastard next to her what she was capable of.

Cards on the table. No more pretending. Time to log into her main account.

One night passed quickly, and the next day arrived—the placement test.

A lot of the time, placement tests are basically a show of force. Especially at good schools, the questions are deliberately harder, so students feel the pressure and urgency of studying.

On top of that, the teachers setting the questions were basically all high school teachers. So their perspective naturally leaned toward high school standards, whether intentionally or not. And for subjects like physics and math, they'd often brush right up against out-of-syllabus material to create final boss questions that really exposed a student's level.

Li Hao was lying on his desk, biting the end of his pen. After all, he'd only started studying seriously for one month over summer break. He was fine with ordinary questions. As for the harder final problems, it wasn't that he had no idea where to start. It just felt off somehow, like he was missing some condition. A faint panic rose in his chest.

He kept erasing and rewriting the last question, but it still didn't feel right.

When he finally finished and wrote down that extremely weird answer, he turned his head and glanced at Feng Yijiu beside him, who was sprawled on the desk in boredom, doodling little figures.

"So he can't do it either."

Li Hao instantly relaxed. And judging by that dispirited look, had he already given up completely?

There were less than ten minutes left before papers had to be handed in, and Li Hao had already watched Feng Yijiu play with her pencil for ten whole minutes.

Ring—

Feng Yijiu felt like she'd just been pardoned. After handing in her paper, she stood up and stretched lazily.

This was killing her. Middle school exams didn't allow early submission, and with nothing to do afterward, she felt like she was in prison. More accurately, she'd been sitting there enjoying classmate Li Hao's wonderful performance.

"There's still another exam later!" Seeing Feng Yijiu pull out a novel to read, Li Hao felt like the idiot beside him was completely beyond saving. Heh. So just a pretty face after all.

"I'm reviewing Chinese!" Feng Yijiu declared righteously.

Li Hao stole a glance at the book in her hands. I Who Entered the World Beneath My Pen Don't Want to Get Married? And you call that studying Chinese?

Li Hao lowered his head and kept reviewing. The tiny bit of sympathy he still had for Feng Yijiu vanished without a trace.

Heh heh. Better get ready to wear women's clothes.

...

"Old Xu, how's your class doing this time?" Since teachers graded the placement tests themselves, there wasn't much ceremony to it. The papers were collected, and grading started right away.

"About the same as usual." Old Xu was the math teacher for the Pioneer Class, so he knew his students pretty well. Looking at these students performing normally, he seemed fairly relaxed. "What, got someone who did well this time?"

"Not bad." Teacher Jiang, the math teacher for Feng Yijiu's class, smiled and handed over a test paper. "Very solid fundamentals."

"Oh?" Old Xu took it and looked. What he found was an extremely neat paper. The handwriting wasn't beautiful, but it was very tidy. The content was concise, but all the scoring formulas were there, and the key points also included the necessary written analysis.

He looked at the sea of red check marks on the paper, then at the total score of only 145, and couldn't help raising his head.

"That brat was just too careless." Teacher Jiang spoke in a tone of frustrated disappointment, but the corners of his mouth were curled up quite a bit.

He pointed at the last question with his red pen. "Look here at the final boss problem, solution two. They used the law of cosines here, and even knew they had to prove it since it's out of syllabus. Hah, but the proof was written wrong. It was originally right, and then this made it wrong. Totally drawing legs on a snake. I have to make her remember this lesson."

"You little punk, you came here just to show off, didn't you? Get lost, get lost." Old Xu feigned anger and rolled up a sheet of scratch paper into a stick, then smacked Teacher Jiang on the head with it. After all, Old Xu had supervised Jiang during his internship, so the two were fairly close—half teacher and half mentor.

Still, Old Xu took note of the name on the paper: Feng Yijiu.

Then he lowered his head and went back to grading his own class's papers. Looking at these scores, mostly in the 120s and 130s, with the highest so far only 138, he suddenly felt no excitement at all.

But that was fine. Classes would be reshuffled in the second semester of first year. Wouldn't she still end up his student? Thinking that, Old Xu's mood improved again. He resumed grading with brisk strokes. "Little Jiang, give me that paper for a second. I can't be bothered to work it out myself."

...

"We're the Pioneer Class. You're all top students, all elites. But this batch of so-called sharp minds actually lost to someone from a second-tier key class. Whether it's mastery of the material or the details of the paper itself... what exactly gives you the right to be arrogant?"

During the math lesson after the exam, Old Xu, as the Pioneer Class's math teacher, took the chance to properly knock some sense into that bunch during class the next day.

At the same time, he projected the original copy of Feng Yijiu's paper onto the screen. First, he let the students look at the almost perfect presentation of the whole paper. Only then did he use Feng Yijiu's paper to start explaining the final boss question.

And when that proud, arrogant Pioneer Class saw Feng Yijiu's paper, they all fell a little silent.

Old Xu swept his gaze across the pairs of eyes below the podium and gave a slight nod inwardly. He was very satisfied with the effect of this lesson. This round of knocking them down a peg had landed perfectly.

"Here, class rep. Come see me after class and take the answer sheet for this paper." Old Xu waved the test paper in his hand as he spoke.

And after the math class representative pinned the photocopy of the paper to the homework corner at the back of the classroom, it didn't take long before the news spread through the Pioneer Class—

The number one score in the placement test's math section had come from a second-tier key class.